Will Biden take on Trump?

Eight days ago, President Donald J. Trump, whose speeches at his political rallies are red meat for his rabid supporters, took a huge swipe at former Vice President Joe Biden.

Speaking to an overflowing, boisterous crowd in Elko, Nev., the Republican president, who has gone all out in this election to preserve the GOP’s majority in Congress, mocked Democrat Biden as “1 percent Joe” – a reference to his low showing in earlier presidential runs.

It is noteworthy that the former long-time U.S. senator from Delaware was also in Nevada on Oct. 20 and had addressed a gathering in Las Vegas, hundreds of miles south of Elko.

But Trump, never one to pull a good kidney punch, boasted about the size of his audience and said Biden drew only a few hundred in Vegas.

The president told his adoring adherents he was “thrilled” that he had attracted one of the biggest crowds he’s ever had.

And there was one more jab directed at Biden.

Trump recalled that in 2008, Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for president, took Biden “off of the trash heap and made him vice president.”

Them are fighting words in blue-collar regions like the Mahoning Valley, which the former vice president will be visiting Monday.

Thus the headline for this column: Will Biden take on Trump?

The answer is obvious: He had better come out swinging during his appearance at a rally on the campus of Youngstown State University. The only chance the Ohio Democratic Party and its nominee for governor, Richard Cordray, have of winning back mostly white male, blue-collar Democratic voters who left in droves to vote for Trump in 2016 is to show they can match him profanity for profanity.

In an old industrial region like this where politics is a blood sport, soaring political rhetoric falls on deaf ears. This is a shot-and-a-beer town. Chardonnay is ostentatious.

Anything less than a political low-blow of the sort Trump has perfected, and his Democratic supporters in Mahoning and Trumbull counties will dismiss Biden as a …. (you know, the lady part Trump said he could grab anytime he wanted when he was the host of “The Apprentice.”)

It’s instructive that during their appearances in Nevada, Biden took aim at the president, but the language he used was certainly no headline-grabber.

The former vice president, referring to Trump’s disregard for this nation’s democratic principles, said American values are “being shredded by a president who is all about himself.”

The comment was as exciting as watching paint dry.

Biden could have delivered the same important message with much more colorful language. Here’s an example: “Donald Trump is a self-aggrandizing, boorish, pathetic excuse for a president who has shredded American values.”

Too extreme? Conduct a Google search of Trump’s hit parade of insults, and there’s nothing Democrats have said about him that even comes close to the venom he has spewed.

Indeed, last week’s attempted bombings of prominent Democrats, including former President Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton, who lost the presidency to Trump in 2016, can be traced to the president’s verbal attacks on them and the other targets.

Florida resident Cesar Altieri Sayoc, who was arrested Friday and charged with sending more than a dozen bomb packages to Trump’s critics, is a registered Republican who reportedly attended Trump rallies.

His Facebook page and Twitter account contained several postings in support of Trump, according to NBC News.

The president dismissed the notion that he was responsible for Sayoc’s alleged acts of terrorism, but the fact remains that his incendiary language has fueled the anger of his supporters toward Democrats and the press.

The cause-and-effect cannot be denied, although the president has attempted to blame reporters for the deep political divide in the country today.

Journalists simply report on what he says or does.

For instance, former Vice President Biden, obviously fed up with Trump’s verbal attacks, once said he would have challenged his archrival to a fight if they were still in high school.

Trump responded with the following tweet: “Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people, Joe!”

It’s this kind of street talk that has endeared Trump to blue-collar workers in the Mahoning Valley. They’re the same folk who formed the core of the late Valley Congressman James A. Traficant Jr.’s political support that kept him in the House of Representatives for more than 17 years.

Democrat Traficant used the same gutter language that has become Republican Trump’s calling card to establish himself as the most powerful officeholder in the Valley.

Traficant’s supporters stood by him through thick and thin and even when he was a federal prisoner for almost eight years after being convicted on public corruption charges.

It’s no accident Trump carried predominantly Democratic Trumbull County in 2016 and did extremely well in heavily Democratic Mahoning County.

His “Make America Great Again” message had the same effect of Traficant’s “Buy American” jingoistic appeal.

Thus, when Republican Trump came to the Valley and promised to reopen the huge steel mills on the banks of the Mahoning River and to revive the domestic auto industry, Democratic voters were willing to forgive him his trespasses.

Biden’s visit to Youngstown on Monday comes at a time when the Democratic Party’s advantage in statewide races, especially governor, is dwindling.

The former vice president has just one assignment: To persuade those Democrats who marched in lockstep with Trump the Pied Piper in 2016 to return to their political roots.

It won’t be easy, which is why Biden must come out swinging when he speaks at the rally at Youngstown State.

Biden is no stranger to this region, having visited many times since 2008, when he was Obama’s vice presidential running mate, but he will confront a new political phenomenon: Teflon Don – as in Trump, not (the New York Mafia godfather) Gotti.