Trump’s new pitch to voters: Blue states are ‘going to hell’

Trailing badly in new national polls, President Trump tried out an audacious new appeal to voters during his epic live-tweeting on Monday of the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett: Parts of America are “going to hell: Vote Trump!”

Trump, who has often derided Democratic-run states, singled out three of them as particularly deplorable

Together, California, New York and Illinois account for 20 percent of the U.S. population. All of them, and the largest cities within them, are led by Democrats.

Trump’s partisan parsing of the country is nothing new. On Sept. 16, two weeks before he announced that he had contracted COVID-19, Trump qualified the number of infections and deaths from the disease in the U.S. by saying “that’s despite the fact that the blue states had tremendous death rates. If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at.”

Since being elected in 2016, Trump has regularly sought to divide the nation in terms of political ideology, and in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, he shifted the focus of his reelection campaign to preserving “law and order.” At a time when the coronavirus pandemic was worsening across the country, and the U.S. economy had shed millions of jobs, Trump promoted dubious claims to draw attention to rising crime rates.

“You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what’s going on in Detroit and other — other cities, all Democrat run,” he told reporters on June 24. “Every one of them is Democrat run. Twenty out of 20. The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat run.”

On Aug. 15, he retweeted Republican activist Brandon Straka, who had written that America should “Leave Democratic cities. Let them rot.”

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