Trump, Facing Headwinds in Ohio, Talks Up Economy in Campaign Swing – The New York Times

And a local corruption scandal that has seen federal racketeering charges filed against the Republican speaker of the House in Ohio could have a toxic effect for other Republicans in the state, Mr. Everhart said.

It is also one of a number of states where Republicans are trying to help Kanye West, the rapper and occasional Trump ally who has said he is running for president, fulfill requirements to get on the ballot, a move that many see as an effort to siphon Black votes away from Mr. Biden. Mr. West appeared to confirm this week in an interview with Forbes that he was trying to harm the former vice president.

Mr. Biden, whose advisers believe can connect with the working-class white voters who bolstered Mr. Trump in 2016, remains an elusive target for the president.

When Mr. Trump arrived in Ohio and gave a speech to a group of supporters, he accused Mr. Biden of trying to “hurt” the Bible and “hurt” God.

“He’s against God,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s against guns. He’s against energy, our kind of energy. I don’t think he’s going to do too well in Ohio.”

The remark prompted a swift rebuke from Mr. Biden’s campaign.

“Joe Biden’s faith is at the core of who he is; he’s lived it with dignity his entire life, and it’s been a source of strength and comfort in times of extreme hardship,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Mr. Biden. “Donald Trump is the only president in our history to have tear-gassed peaceful Americans and thrown a priest out of his church just so he could profane it — and a Bible — for his own cynical optics as he sought to tear our nation apart at a moment of crisis and pain.”

Mr. Trump maintained that Mr. Biden frequently is confused about his whereabouts, during a speech in which the president mispronounced Thailand as “Thighland,” catching himself a short time later.

The president spoke as his aides struggled to get a deal for new legislation to help people suffering economic pain caused by the coronavirus, something Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, have been scrambling to achieve in negotiations with Democratic leaders. Mr. Trump has not been a meaningful part of the talks, preferring to comment from the sidelines. After a fund-raiser on Thursday evening in Ohio, he will head to his private club in New Jersey and has fund-raisers scheduled this weekend.

Mr. Trump’s swing through Ohio took him to Clyde, where he toured a Whirlpool factory. The president wore a mask as he walked through the plant, giving a thumbs-up sign to photographers nearby, a notable move given his longstanding resistance to the masks until the past few weeks.

Then, standing at a lectern with the presidential seal, his face glistening with sweat, Mr. Trump delivered a winding series of remarks that were ostensibly about trade and the economy, but that took several detours into criticizing Mr. Biden and complaining about his political lot in life.

“I had such a beautiful life before I did this,” Mr. Trump said at one point.

The president’s inability to stick to his script has infuriated and exasperated his advisers, who believe he could be in a much stronger position in the campaign if only he would stop creating so much content for his critics and opponent.

During the event, Mr. Trump announced his plan to reimpose tariffs on Canadian-made aluminum. He criticized Mr. Biden and former President Barack Obama as purveyors of “broken promises and brazen sellouts and lost jobs.”

He insisted the job outlook would improve soon, despite the sharp rise in unemployment when the pandemic began and the continued elevated levels of new claims for jobless benefits — developments that have undercut his ability to claim he has delivered on his promises of four years ago to restore American manufacturing might and middle-class opportunity.

He praised the economy that existed before the arrival of the virus. And he lauded his administration’s response to the coronavirus despite polling suggesting that voters are displeased with his repeated playing down of the threat.

He talked up an executive order requiring the federal government to buy “essential” drugs from within the United States, instead of countries like China, where the coronavirus originated. And he maintained there could be a vaccine “long before the end of the year,” despite skepticism from the health experts in his administration and concern among regulators about pressure to approve a vaccine on a political calendar.

And a day after Facebook and Twitter forced his campaign accounts to remove video of him falsely saying that children are “almost immune” to the virus, he simply cited children as “strong” in fighting off the illness.

At another point, after frequently criticizing Democratic governors, he said, “We cannot defeat the virus by fighting against each other.”