Trump relaunches campaign with vaccine promise

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump relaunched his election campaign with a live television event inside the iconic Lincoln Memorial, promising an early coronavirus vaccine.

With a two-hour long town hall, Trump sought to persuade a nation battered by death and mass unemployment to look ahead and urged Americans to put the pandemic behind them to embrace an “incredible” future.

“We can’t stay closed as a country, we’re not going to have a country left,” he said on the show, where two moderators, as well as ordinary citizens via video, put questions to him in front of the monument. “We’re going to have an incredible following year,” he said.

Trump forecast good news on the hunt for a vaccine saying Americans should start going back to beaches this summer and recommending that shuttered schools need to reopen in September.

“We are very confident that we’re going to have a vaccine… by the end of the year,” he said, admitting he was getting ahead of his own advisors with the prediction.

Trump is faring poorly in most polls ahead of the November presidential contest against Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who remains shuttered in his Delaware home.

He faces criticism for his divisive style during a time of national calamity and is also accused by some of botching the early response to the COVID-19 virus. The previously booming US economy, which was seen as a golden ticket to his second term, is now in dire straits due to the nationwide lockdown.

Trump is itching to return to the campaign trail and faces new criticism that he is trying to declare premature victory, even as the illness continues to kill thousands of Americans every week. His emphasis has been on resurrecting his image as a can-do leader who can end the skyrocketing unemployment caused by the lockdown.

The shift began on Sunday at possibly the most hallowed monument in the country — the statue of Abraham Lincoln, who led the country through civil war, urged reconciliation, and was assassinated in his moment of triumph.

Trump, who calls himself a wartime president denied that the election will turn into a referendum on his handling of the crisis. In the next few days, Trump will follow up by breaking months of self-quarantine with long-distance trips to the key electoral states of Arizona and Ohio.

Lincoln stated that only war could preserve the United States by ending slavery and restoring the nation’s ideals of freedom. He won and become a national hero, but unlike Trump, he is remembered as much for reaching out to former foes.

Trump said presidents allowed reliance on foreign manufacturers for US medicines. He said the Democrats are ‘radical’, claiming they would prefer to see people get sick than see him succeed. Trump pronounced that he had “done more than any president in the history of our country in the first three years.”