Dueling Georgia rallies cap defining week for Biden, Trump campaigns
The flurry of activity offers a glimpse into the nature of the fight voters can expect to see play out over the next eight months.
Although polls have shown Donald Trump (left) with a slight edge over Joe Biden (right), both candidates are struggling to energize their base supporters. | Mike Stewart/AP; Brynn Anderson/AP
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump held competing campaign rallies on Saturday in battleground Georgia, days after Super Tuesday brought the long-anticipated, ugly rematch into hyperfocus.
The location of their dueling events was no accident. Biden’s rally in the Atlanta area was just a few miles from the Fulton County Jail, where Trump was booked last summer on charges in Georgia’s election interference case against him and a number of his allies. And Trump was shoring up his support in Rome, part of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district in the state’s conservative northwest.
Trump, who was scheduled to speak before Biden, took the stage minutes after the president wrapped his event 70 miles away. While Biden delivered a condensed version of his State of the Union address, Trump spent the first 10 minutes of his rally railing against the president’s Thursday night speech.
“Joe Biden should not be shouting angrily at America,” Trump said. “America should be shouting angrily at Joe Biden.”
Saturday’s split screen wraps a defining week in the 2024 race for the White House, as both Biden and Trump swept Super Tuesday contests and the president delivered a fiery State of the Union address hammering his predecessor. The flurry of activity, particularly from the Biden campaign, offers a glimpse into the pace and nature of the fight voters can expect to see play out over the next eight months.
The venue of the split-screen visit — Georgia — also underscores the bitter nature of the rematch between the two men in what is already shaping up to be a historically long general election. Biden became the first Democrat since 1992 to flip the state, winning it in 2020 by just 12,000 votes and delivering a brutal blow to Trump’s reelection effort and his ego.