Trump says Minnesota will be 'overrun and destroyed' by refugees if Biden wins: 'Good luck, enjoy yourselves'

President takes personal shots at foes as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg passes away

Donald Trump warned voters in Minnesota that a President Joe Biden would “overrun” Minnesota with refugees from Somalia and other countries he called “the most dangerous places in the world.”

As Mr Trump made dire warnings about an alleged “flood” of refugees and took personal shots at his foes and re-litigated Hillary Clinton’s email mishandling, he was not told that liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had passed away. Her deathbed wish was reportedly to not be replaced on the bench “until a new president is installed.”

"Your state will be overrun and destroyed if Biden and the radical left win,” the president said at the start of a campaign rally in Bemidji, Minnesota, a community with a large Somali population.

“One of the most vital issues in this election is the subject of refugees – you know it, you know it perhaps better than almost anybody,” he told the crowd of white faces at an airport there. “Good luck, Minnesota. You having a good time with your refugees? That's good.

“We want to – Omar, yeah, he said ‘Omar,’ that's a beauty,” he said, referring to Minnesota Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, with whom he has engaged in a war of words since she took office in early 2019. 

A few minutes later, the president called her an “extremist” who has committed “criminal acts.”

“I say to myself, 'How the hell does she get away with that?” he said as the large crowd booed. 

Mr Trump’s Friday stop in the Great Lakes State was something of a long-shot try at trying to flip a state he lost narrowly four years ago.

Most sites’ tracking polls in battlegrounds no longer include Minnesota.

RealClearPolitics’ average of polls there give Mr Biden a 10-point lead with less than two months to go, but Mr Trump, as he did again on Friday, predicted he will finish the job he started in 2016. One survey, concluded on 18 September by the Washington Post and ABC News, gives the former vice president a commanding 16-point lead.

That makes Minnesota something of an outlier in the Midwest, where Mr Trump has been chipping away at his rival’s leads. Mr Trump has halved Mr Biden’s leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan and other states in late-July.

“I just saw a poll, it said down nine,” he said as the crowd chanted “We love Trump!”

“I don’t think so,” Mr Trump said of such surveys. “Biden’s got the circles. You know why he’s got the circles? He can’t draw people. … He goes to a high school gymnasium, he draws 40 or 50 people.”

All evidence suggests the president’s law-and-order message in the face of sometimes-violence protests over racial inequality and police violence against black people is resonating in the Rust Belt.

Eager to close the deal there, the Democratic nominee also stopped in Minnesota.

Mr Biden continued an attack he began the previous night during a CNN town hall during which he cast himself as the graduate of a state university and Mr Trump as an Ivy League snob. The election pits “Scranton versus Park Avenue,” Mr Biden said during that event, referring to his Pennsylvania hometown and the area of New York City that is home to Trump Tower.

Here was the former VP on Friday: “Like a lot of you, I spent a lot of my life with guys like Donald Trump looking down on me. Looking down on people who make a living with their hands, people who take care of our kids, clean our streets.

“These are the guys who always thought they were better than me, better than us, because they had a lot of money,” he added. “Guys who inherited everything they got and still managed to squander it.”

Mr Trump will be back on the campaign trail on Saturday, with another airport rally. This time, he will jet to Fayetteville, North Carolina, trying to fire up his supporters in another state he won narrowly in 2016. Mr Biden is not expected to be on the road Saturday with 45 days left before voters head to the polls.