Tag: Joe Biden

Biden says Trump is America’s first ‘racist’ president

Washington Post logoJoe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, on Wednesday called President Trump the country’s first racist to be elected to the White House.

The former vice president’s blunt assessment came during a virtual town hall organized by the Service Employees International Union after a health-care worker expressed concern that Trump continues to blame Asians for the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden signaled that he shared the questioner’s concern that Trump frequently refers to the pandemic as the “China virus,” saying, “the way he deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening.” Continue reading.

Democrats keep having to clean up Republican messes. When is our turn to advance America?

A President Biden would face extraordinary damage and repair jobs at home and abroad. Democrats must hammer this home to voters and stop the cycle.

Should former Vice President Joe Biden defeat President Donald Trump in the November election, his victory will cement a pattern that influential Democratic messengers would be wise to exploit savagely in order to change.

Many Americans have not yet grasped that every time they have given Republicans the keys to the White House over the past half-century, they turn to Democrats to extinguish the fire. This arrangement hampers party priorities each time Democrats come to power because their first orders of business are to clean up the ashes. Once the country is sturdy enough, the electorate returns to Republicans to get a little extra walking around cash in the form of marginal tax cuts, and Democratic policy goes back underground.

This pattern began when Richard Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, presided over a three-year recession that darkened the outlook for Ford before the 1976 campaign launched in earnest. Democrat Jimmy Carter glided into office on a message of reform, after the country felt betrayed by Watergate and Nixon’s corrupt inner circle, and of recovery from poor GOP stewardship of the economy. Continue reading.

Biden: After intel briefings, warns of election interference

Joe Biden said Friday night that he’s begun receiving intelligence briefings as he warned that Russia, China and other adversaries were attempting to undermine the upcoming U.S. election in November.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee wasn’t specific and offered no evidence while addressing a virtual fundraiser with more than 200 attendees. But, in the process, he confirmed receiving classified briefings after saying as recently as late last month that he wasn’t getting them but might request one about reports of Russian bounties being offered on U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“We know from before, and I guarantee you I know now because now I get briefings again. The Russians are still engaged, trying to de-legitimize our electoral process. Fact,” Biden said Friday. “China and others are engaged as well in activities designed for us to lose confidence in the outcome.” Continue reading.

From ‘Sleepy Joe’ to a destroyer of the ‘American way of life,’ Trump’s attacks on Biden make a dystopian shift

Washington Post logoPresident Trump has launched a slash-and-burn campaign against an exaggerated caricature of his Democratic opponent, casting former vice president Joe Biden as a destroyer of basic freedoms and a threat to voters’ safety who would “let terrorists roam free” and “abolish the American way of life.”

His new dystopian vision, with militant and extreme language not typical in American politics, marks a sharp departure from Trump’s previous effort to cast Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” an establishment politician with deteriorating mental abilities. It marks the latest effort, orchestrated by Trump’s advisers, to shift the conversation from rising coronavirus infections and deteriorating public support for the president’s pandemic response.

In new advertising, tweets and public statements that began to appear earlier this month, Trump has argued that the presumptive Democratic nominee is a harbinger of chaos and destruction, depicting a fantastical scarecrow largely divorced from reality.

Trump’s flawed Rose Garden assault on Joe Biden

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s media event Tuesday — which was mostly an extended monologue — was like watching our database of Trumpian claims unroll in real time. So many of Trump’s rhetorical favorites were tossed out — that he had built the best economy in U.S. history (no), that he inherited few ventilators (no), that he overrode his aides to impose some travel restrictions on China (no), that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) “danced” in the streets in defiance of the coronavirus (no), that he “rebuilt” a “totally depleted” military (no), that the European Union was formed to take advantage of the United States (no). It went on and on.

But rather than rehash old ground, in this roundup we will focus on Trump’s claims against his election rival, former vice president Joe Biden. Violating norms and protocol, the president used the august setting of the Rose Garden for a sustained campaign-style attack. Here are some of the more noteworthy claims he made. We don’t award Pinocchios in roundups, but many of these statements are wildly off-course. Continue reading “Trump’s flawed Rose Garden assault on Joe Biden”

A new Trump ad shows why his re-election campaign is such a disaster

AlterNet logoThere’s a new ad out from the Trump campaign, and it shows quite clearly why the president’s team is having such a hard time selling the prospect of his re-election.

The video begins by listing a series of supposed agenda items from the “radical left-wing mob” — taking over cities, defunding police — claiming that Biden supports these goals.

Clearly, the Trump campaign had a plan to run against Sen. Bernie Sanders as a dangerous socialist, and it’s trying to use that same playbook against Biden. But however effective that script may or may not have been against Sanders, it’s clearly an uphill battle to use it against Biden. Biden famously and decisively won the primary against Sanders by running in opposition to the left-wing of the Democratic Party, so it will be hard to convince voters that he’s a secret radical. Continue reading.

Biden seeks to take on Trump over economy

The Hill logoJoe Biden is taking aim at President Trump on the economy, hoping to undercut Trump’s strongest argument in his reelection bid. 

With COVID-19 wreaking havoc on the economy and unemployment at its highest level in years, Team Biden believes it can go on offense on the issue, which had long been a strength for Trump.

Polls continue to show that a majority approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, but Democrats see a vulnerability. Continue reading.

Virus outbreak reshapes presidential race in Sun Belt — CBS News Battleground Tracker poll

The coronavirus outbreak is reshaping the presidential race in three key Sun Belt states. Joe Biden is now leading President Trump by six points in Florida, and the two are tied in Arizona and competitive in Texas, where Biden is down by just a point to Mr. Trump. Biden has made gains in part because most say their state’s efforts to contain the virus are going badly — and the more concerned voters are about risks from the outbreak, the more likely they are to support Biden.

In all three states, most voters say their state reopened too soon, and those who say this feel their state went too fast under pressure from the Trump administration. Most also say the president is doing a bad job handling the outbreak. He may be paying a price for that, at least in the short term.

This is helping Biden not only to post bigger gains with groups that already trend Democratic — like women and younger voters — but also to cut into Mr. Trump’s margins with seniors. Seniors who are very concerned about coronavirus back Biden in large numbers.