TAMPA: Joe Biden is tearing into President Donald Trump for his reported remarks referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers” during a Tuesday campaign visit to the key battleground state of Florida.
“Nowhere are his faults more glaring and more offensive, to me at least, than when it comes to his denigration of our service members, veterans, wounded warriors who have fallen,” Biden said at a campaign event with veterans in the Tampa area.
It marked Biden's latest reaction on remarks, sourced anonymously and first reported in The Atlantic, describing offensive comments by the president toward fallen and captured US service members, including calling World War I dead at an American military cemetery in France “losers” and “suckers” in 2018.
Trump has denied the remarks. But the reported comments, many of which were confirmed independently by The Associated Press, have given Biden an opening to press what Democrats believe may be an opening among veteran voters and military families, who broadly supported Trump in 2016.
During the Tuesday event, Biden spoke about his son Beau, who served in the Delaware National Guard and died of a brain tumor in 2015.
“He's gone now, but he's no sucker," Biden said.
Biden spoke about his experience as vice president escorting military caskets home and working on military issues, and about his own commitments to strengthen the VA and tackle veterans mental health crisis. And he attacked Trump for what he said were failed promises to veterans.
“President Trump likes to say he passed VA Choice, but just like everything else he seems to say, it's a figment of his imagination or a flat-out lie,” he said, referencing a program passed under the Obama administration that steers more patients to the private sector.
The event kicked off Biden's first trip back to Florida as the Democratic presidential nominee. Later in the day, Biden will hold a Hispanic Heritage Month kickoff event in Kissimmee, near Orlando, as part of an urgent mission to build support among Latinos who could decide the election in one of the nation's fiercest battleground states.
A win for Biden in Florida would dramatically narrow Trump's path to reelection. But in a state where elections are often decided by a percentage point, there are mounting concerns that Biden may be slipping, particularly with the state's influential Latino voters.
An NBC-Marist poll released last week found Latinos in the state about evenly divided between Biden and Trump. Democrat Hillary Clinton led Trump by a 59% to 36 per cent margin among Latinos in the same poll in 2016 — and Trump won Florida by about 1 percentage point.
Hispanic voters in Florida tend to be somewhat more Republican-leaning than Hispanic voters nationwide because of the state's Cuban American population. Nationally, little public polling is available to measure the opinions of Latino voters this year and whether they differ from four years ago.
Biden's trip suggests he isn't taking chances in Florida. He's spending his day along the Interstate 4 corridor, which is often where campaigns are won or lost.
While Republicans typically post big numbers in the northern and southwestern parts of the state and Democrats are strong in coastal cities, campaigns typically battle it out for every vote in central Florida.
Biden's decision to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month in Kissimmee reflects a focus on the state's rapidly growing Puerto Rican community, many of whom relocated to Florida after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017.
Biden will likely continue his attacks on Trump for the slow federal response to the hurricane. During a Monday speech about climate change, he made a point of mentioning Puerto Rico.
“Our fellow Americans are still putting things back together from the last big storm as they face the next one,” he said.
Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez said the party has invested in outreach to Puerto Rican voters by collecting cellphone numbers they believe are connected to those displaced by Maria.
“We went to cellphone vendors in Pennsylvania and Florida, and we asked them, 'Give us all the 787 area codes that have been picked up off your cellphone towers for the last month.'”
Perez said the party found nearly 300,000 such numbers in Florida and 80,000 in Pennsylvania, another key battleground state.
Puerto Ricans may be more open to Biden than Cuban Americans concentrated in Miami, who are attuned to Trump's message that the Democratic ticket would embrace socialism.
Indeed, surrogates for the Trump campaign focused on Cuban immigrants during a call with reporters Tuesday ahead of Biden's visit.

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK: President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he had heard that Oracle Corp was very close to a deal over ByteDance's TikTok, even as sources said the Chinese company was seeking to keep majority ownership of the popular short video app.
Trump has ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok amid U.S. concerns that user data could be passed to China's Communist Party government. He has threatened to ban TikTok in the United States as early as Sunday if ByteDance does not comply.
Under ByteDance's proposal, however, the Beijing-based company would keep a majority stake in TikTok's global business and create headquarters for TikTok in the United States, the sources said. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Monday that ByteDance has also offered to create 20,000 U.S. jobs with TikTok.
Oracle would become ByteDance's technology partner responsible for the management of TikTok's data and take a minority stake in TikTok, the sources added.
"I heard they are very close to a deal," Trump said, adding that he was a fan of Oracle's chairman, Larry Ellison. He added that he would look into the proposed agreement.
The ByteDance proposal calls for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the U.S. government panel that is overseeing the deal talks, to supervise how TikTok will be operated, one of the sources said.
Mnuchin, who chairs CFIUS, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross were meeting at the White House on Tuesday to consider ByteDance's proposal, two of the sources said.
It is unclear whether Trump will approve ByteDance's proposal, the sources said, requesting anonymity because the deliberations are confidential. The White House, ByteDance and Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
While TikTok is best known for dancing videos that go viral among teenagers, U.S. officials have had concerns since last year about whether the personal information of its 100 million U.S. users could be compromised under its Chinese owner.
ByteDance's plan calls for restrictions in its control of TikTok, the sources said. It asks CFIUS to agree to operational arrangements similar to those it put in place when it allowed SoftBank Group Corp to acquire U.S. wireless carrier Sprint in 2013, according to the sources. These could include the U.S. government approving board directors at TikTok, as well as its relationships with major vendors, the sources said.
ByteDance is also hoping that Ellison’s fundraising for Trump, as well as Oracle Chief Executive Safra Catz’s backing of Trump’s transition team four years ago, will boost its chances, Reuters has reported.