Former Vice President Joe Biden is holding little back in his bid for the White House. This week, he tore apart President Donald Trump’s explanation for his controversial remarks after the white nationalist-fueled violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in late 2017. After Biden pointed to the incident as evidence of how starkly he could contrast with Trump in his campaign announcement video, Trump sought to explain away his comment that there were “very fine people” on both sides as only referring to the people who wanted to save a Charlottesville statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Biden says, quite simply, that Trump’s explanation is worthless nonsense.
At an Iowa campaign event, he shared:
‘He now has come down and doubled down on concocting a phony story about how these violent thugs only wanted to protect the statue of Robert E. Lee. Give me a break. No, no, I mean, this is — enough’s enough, man. The very rally was advertised — advertised — as a white supremacist rally. Anti-Semitic chants were clear. Hatred was on the march, and he knew it.’
Watch:
Even still, although he did eventually get around to explicitly condemning white nationalists and neo-Nazis, Trump stood in front of the world and asserted there were “very fine people” on both sides of the “Unite the Right” rally that rocked Charlottesville, Virginia, in late 2017 and ended with one counterprotester dead and numerous others injured. The Trump team has refused to acknowledge there was anything wrong with those remarks, pointing only to the president’s rare condemnations of hate groups and ignoring the mountain of occasions on which he’s sided with their agendas via means like decrying asylum seekers from Central America as a dangerous “invasion.”
There’s certainly a precedent for the Trump team concocting nonsense stories. President Trump himself has been documented to have lied thousands upon thousands of times and counting since taking office. Many of his close associates have done the same, including press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was revealed to have lied by the final report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and then lied about lying, claiming her original remarks weren’t as baseless as they really were.
They’ve all got good reason to be worried about Biden and whip out mountains of lies in an attempt at defense. In pretty much all polling of the Democratic presidential primary field, even that conducted before he formally announced his candidacy, he’s on top. In recent Morning Consult, CNN, and Quinnipiac polls he had a commanding lead with 36, 39, and 38 percent of the support, respectively. Meanwhile, in every single poll that RealClearPolitics collected since the start of the year measuring support in a potential general election match-up between Trump and Biden, the popular former vice president was way out ahead. The average has him a full 7.5 percent ahead of Trump, who just keeps hurtling down the same path hoping something’ll change.
Going into 2020, he has few points to campaign on outside of economic growth, and it’s not like he sat in the Oval Office and pushed a button to make that happen. On the flip side, he has gone from slashing corporate tax rates to threatening to withdraw the nationwide health coverage expansion that’s provided for millions of people under ObamaCare — and that’s not a good look, to say the least.
Featured Image via screenshot
