President Donald Trump doubled down on attacks on former Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday evening as he offered closing arguments for his 2020 reelection campaign to a pumped-up crowd of supporters at the Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport.

“Joe Biden will shut down your economy, ship your jobs to China where they pay him a lot of money, raise your taxes $4 trillion and send your state into a deep depression,” Trump said. “There will be no fracking, no mining, no natural gas, no heating in the winter, no air conditioning in the summer. … There’ll be no Easter, no Christmas, no Thanksgiving, no Fourth of July — no nothing.”

Trump swept into the Republican county just north of Pittsburgh — that he won by 37 points in 2016 — on Marine One as the sun was setting. The rally was the third stop of a cross-state barnstorming tour that was scheduled to end with yet another stop late Saturday night in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Gasfield workers Chris Ondecko, 36, and co-worker Clayton Trump, 45, traveled from Washington County to stand with “Hard Hats for Trump.” They were typical of the thousands who crowded the flag-draped runway at the small airport in Penn Township.

“I’m very Republican and very conservative,” said Ondecko, who sported a Trump 2016 T-shirt under his jacket. “I work in the natural gas industry, and I like everything he’s done.”

Dennis Muir, 66, a retired tool-and-die manufacturer from Butler who attended the rally with his wife and three adult children, said Trump has delivered on all of his promises.

“One thing that impresses me about Trump is he didn’t have to do this,” Muir said. “He did this because he loves America. He’s not a politician.”

Others traveled much farther. Carol Siebnan, of Dallas, Texas, said she and her husband, Clyde, grabbed a commercial flight to Pittsburgh to attend the rally when they realized it would be their only chance to see him before the election.

The Pennsylvania rallies capped a series of last-minute campaign stops by Trump and his campaign surrogates as he struggled to pull even with Biden in the critical swing state the president won in 2016 by 44,000 votes, less than 1 % of more than six million votes cast.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg stood in for the Biden campaign in Pittsburgh on Saturday, even as Biden and running mate Kamala Harris and their surrogates planned a last-minute series of rallies Monday across the state that controls 20 Electoral College votes.

Trump states his case

Speaking to an energized crowd gathered on an airstrip where a gas drilling rig and gas industry tanker trucks adorned with Trump placards were parked, Trump said he had great news for the region.

“This is breaking news: Moments ago I signed an order to protect Pennsylvania fracking and block any effort to undermine energy production in your state,” he said, triggering a roar from the crowd.

He boasted that this week’s economic news included a 33.1% uptick in an economy still struggling to regain jobs lost in the pandemic shutdown.

The president also took credit for saving 1,400 jobs at AK Steel, the specialty steelmaker in Butler that is the nation’s only producer of electrical steel, even though the company has lobbied the president for tariff protections for months, claiming it is struggling to survive foreign dumping.

Trump said a recent poll found that “56% of Americans say they were better off than four years ago.”

“And that’s in a pandemic. We’re rounding the corner on the pandemic,” he insisted, even as new cases of covid-19 surged in Western Pennsylvania and across the country and the nation’s death toll hit 230,000.

“Open up your state, Governor,” he said, again triggering cheers from the crowd.

Biden responds

The Biden campaign countered that Trump’s failure to move quickly on the pandemic, which the president refers to a “the China virus,” is still resounding across the country.

“President Trump’s refusal to take covid-19 seriously or be honest with the American people about the reality of the virus has cost Pennsylvania thousands of lives and hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Biden responded in an email. “Over four years in office, all President Trump has delivered to working families in Pennsylvania are broken promises. Pennsylvanians see these failures every day in the factories that have closed down in their town, in the empty chair at their kitchen table, and in the stack of medical bills that they are unable to pay.”

At the rally in Butler, Trump smiled as a video flashed of Biden and Harris alternately vowing to end the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.

“Will you remember that Pennsylvania? Will you remember that Texas?” he said.

“We have made America strong again. We have made America proud again,” Trump said. “And with your help, we will make America great again.”

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