President Donald Trump is painting a dystopian portrait of what Joe Biden's America might look like, asserting crime and chaos would ravage communities should the former vice president win the White House in November.

Left unsaid: A recent surge in violent crime in several American cities has happened on his watch. "Irony is way down the list of things that President Trump worries about," said Robert Spitzer, a political scientist at the State University of New York College at Cortland whose research focuses on gun politics and the US presidency. "He's turning to the old playbook — appeal to the fears of Americans and then associate those fears with the Democratic Party, specifically Joe Biden."