President Donald Trump, during a visit to a shipyard in Wisconsin on Thursday, boasted he was redesigning planned Navy ships to make them ...
President Donald Trump, during a visit to a shipyard in Wisconsin on Thursday, boasted he was redesigning planned Navy ships to make them more 'beautiful.'
His trip to the 2020 battleground state came as a new New York Times/Siena College poll showed him trailing Democratic rival Joe Biden by 11 points in Wisconsin. In addition to his tour of the Fincantieri Marinette Marine, the president also taped a town hall meeting with Fox News host Sean Hannity in Green Bay.
But he told the audience of a few hundred people - with the Cooperstown, a Littoral ship, docked behind him - that he was redesigning ships for the Navy. Fincantieri Marinette Marine has a contract to build Navy ships.
'They look terrible,' Trump complained of the ship designs. 'I changed designs. I looked at it I said that's a terrible looking ship. Let's make it beautiful. It'll cost you the same and maybe less. You know sometimes you can make it look great for less money.'
'They gave me a beautiful model. That's absolutely - it's like a yacht with missiles on it,' he added. 'It's like beautiful, but you know it's true you can build beautifully and it costs you sometimes less money.'
President Donald Trump, during a visit to a shipyard in Wisconsin, boasted he was redesigning planned Navy ships to make them more 'beautiful'
In his address, Trump said of the ship designs: 'They look terrible. I changed designs. I looked at it I said that's a terrible looking ship. Let's make it beautiful. It'll cost you the same and maybe less. You know sometimes you can make it look great for less money'
President Trump addressed a crowd at the Fincantieri Marinette Marine-with the Cooperstown, a Littoral ship, docked behind him
However, of the ship behind him, he said: 'They gave me a beautiful model. That's absolutely - it's like a yacht with missiles on it. It's like beautiful, but you know it's true you can build beautifully and it costs you sometimes less money'
The president was in Wisconsin to tout his economic record - one area of his presidency where voters give him high marks.
Trump bragged about a new Navy contract for the shipyard that he said was worth $5.5 billion. The company received a contract to build 10 Navy frigates - a deal that could add 1,000 jobs. It's the first new major shipbuilding program for the U.S. Navy in more than a decade.
'It's gonna be built right here in the American heartland and it's going to be built by you. And it's going to go on for a long time because it's up to 20 ships and might be extended,' he said.
Trump is trailing Biden in Wisconsin by 8 points according to the RealClearPolitics polling average of the battleground state.
His visit came as the New York Times poll of six swing states - Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina - showed Biden leading in all of them. Trump won the six states in 2016 - a mass of victories that put him in the White House. Should Biden win any three of them plus all the states Hillary Clinton carried in 2016, he would be the victor in November.
As Trump was in Wisconsin touting an economy coming back from its coronavirus hit, Biden was in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, hitting the president for his response to the pandemic.
The president was in Wisconsin to tout his economic record - one area of his presidency where voters give him high marks
Trump bragged about a new Navy contract for the shipyard that he said was worth $5.5 billion
The company received a contract to build 10 Navy frigates - a deal that could add 1,000 jobs. It's the first new major shipbuilding program for the U.S. Navy in more than a decade
President Donald Trump, during a visit to a shipyard in Wisconsin, boasted he was redesigning planned Navy ships to make them more 'beautiful'
'There are no miracles coming,' Biden warned.
'Amazingly, he hasn't grasped the most basic fact of this crisis: To fix the economy we have to get control over the virus,' Biden said of Trump during an event in Lancaster. 'He's like a child who can´t believe this has happened to him. His whining and self-pity. This pandemic didn't happen to him. It happened to all of us.'
The Times polls showed Biden up by 10 points in Pennsylvania, his home state. When Trump carried that state in 2016, he was the first Republican to win it in more than 20 years.
And Thursday was a rare day of dueling public appearances for the political rivals as they slowly ratcheted up their event schedules as the country goes through the reopening process from the shut down instituted by the coronavirus.
It also made for a marked comparison between the two men - Biden wore a face mask and focused on the virus while Trump stayed maskless and talked up the economy.
Trump, in his 25 minutes of remarks in Wisconsin, barely mentioned the coronavirus, merely to repeat his argument that increased testing was behind the rising number of coronavirus cases in the United States.
More than 2.41 million people in the U.S. have been infected with the disease and at least 122,200 have died.
'We're up to almost 30 million tests, that means we're gonna have more cases, if we didn't want to test, or if we didn't test we wouldn't have cases,' Trump said.
Joe Biden campaigned in Pennsylvania where he attacked President Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic
While in Wisconsin, President Trump taped a town hall meeting with Fox News' Sean Hannity
At least 26 states are seeing new coronavirus cases increase compared with the prior week as the reopening process goes forward.
Despite the pandemic, Trump claimed the economy, which saw record levels of unemployment during the pandemic, is coming back.
'Our economy is coming back at a level that nobody ever imagined possible we doing great,' he said.
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