PROTECTING BENEFITS
But Trump hopes to upstage her by arriving first in a state where he says residents are struggling to afford health care following a 21 per cent rise in prices over Biden’s term.
“This is why president Trump has promised to not cut a single penny from Social Security or Medicare and why he has always pledged to protect these imperative benefits to America’s seniors,” the statement said.
During his presidency, Trump released four successive annual budgets that proposed cutting Medicare, a federal health insurance programme for seniors. Experts disagree on how much those cuts would have hurt beneficiaries had they been enacted.
Trump told reporters last week that he did not plan to hold swing state campaign events until after next week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
But Republicans have been pressuring him to do more to show he can keep up with Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, who have attracted blockbuster crowds to their events.
Asheville is part of a series of planned campaign stops themed around specific topics and will be followed on Saturday by an event focusing on consumer prices, crime and immigration in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.
Trump won his narrowest victory in North Carolina in his losing 2020 campaign, and it is considered one of the handful of swing states that tend to decide US elections.
But Buncombe County, where Asheville is located, is a liberal enclave and some locals have been scratching their heads over Trump’s decision to visit.
Several local media outlets reported that Trump’s alleged one-time paramour, porn actress Stormy Daniels, would be performing her stage show in town two days after the ex-president, but there was no suggestion that this had any bearing on his schedule.
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