JOE BIDEN HIT out at US President Donald Trump today accusing his rival of surrendering to a surging pandemic, as the Democrat took his campaign to the Republican stronghold of Georgia one week before the US election.

While the former vice president went on the attack, seeking to expand the campaign map and his state-by-state path to victory on November 3, Trump electioneered the Midwest in a bid to shore up states which voted for him in 2016 but which polls show are tilting Biden’s way.

And with the campaign narrowing down to its final days, Biden tapped one of his top supporters, popular former president Barack Obama, to deliver a closing argument for Democrats in Florida, a must-win swing state for Trump if he is to defy the odds and earn reelection.

Biden, buoyed by poll numbers that show him leading the incumbent, drilled in on Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, reminding voters that Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows conceded at the weekend that “we’re not going to control the pandemic”.

Biden, speaking in Warm Springs, Georgia, branded the response “a capitulation” by a White House that “never really tried” to halt a pandemic which has now killed more than 226,000 Americans.

Instead of acting as a wartime president to battle Covid-19 as he promised, Trump “shrugged, he swaggered and he surrendered,” Biden said.

“I’m here to tell you: We can and we will control this virus,” he added.

“If you give me the honour of serving as your president, clear the decks for action,” he said. “For we will act… on the first day of my presidency to get Covid under control.”

‘Working my ass off!’

Biden, 77, was holding a socially distanced drive-in rally later in Atlanta, Georgia’s largest city.

Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by five points in Georgia in 2016 but polls have the 74-year-old running neck-in-neck with Biden in the state.

Georgia last voted for a Democrat for president nearly three decades ago — Bill Clinton in 1992 — but the Biden campaign has high hopes of flipping the state and also winning its two US Senate seats up for grabs.

Trump meanwhile maintained his hectic campaign pace, holding an open-air rally in Michigan followed by two events in Wisconsin. 

Both are Midwestern battlegrounds which he won by razor thin margins four years ago, but Trump insisted “we’re leading almost everywhere” thanks to his frantic campaign schedule.

“I’ve got to say I’m working my ass off here!” he boomed in Lansing, Michigan, eliciting a huge cheer.

Trump also said his pandemic policies and economic chops would serve the nation better than Biden.

“This election is a choice between a Trump super-recovery or Biden depression,” he said.

© – AFP, 2020