Speaking at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Joe Biden started almost right away with jokes about his expected challenger in this year’s general election, Donald Trump.
“I want to thank you for the warm welcome. But please — not so loud. Donald is listening. ‘Sleepy Don,'” Biden quipped to the gathered media figures. “I kind of like that. I may use that again.”
Recent reports have stated that Trump appeared to be dozing off — repeatedly — during his ongoing criminal trial in New York City on allegations of falsifying business records in tandem with an alleged ambition of impacting the 2016 presidential race in a manner favorable to the now former White House occupant. Trump is compelled to attend the proceedings, which constitute his first criminal trial among what the ex-president’s current slate of legal troubles suggest could eventually be four.
Biden’s joke about Trump references something that the former president’s corner has tried to make a major issue amid this year’s presidential race: Biden’s aptitude. Some on the Right have used the “Sleepy Joe” epithet for the incumbent, who, to be clear, isn’t the one still insisting that he won a presidential election in 2020 that every credible authority describes otherwise. That would be Donald Trump.
Trump, meanwhile, has commented somewhat on his personal experiences of that trial beyond the case’s substance, alleging recently in a strange rant that there might be some kind of conspiracy to… make the courtroom cold. Trump complained to gathered media about “another day of court in a freezing courthouse. It’s very cold in there — on purpose, I believe. They don’t seem to be able to get the temperature up. It shouldn’t be that complicated. But we have a freezing courthouse, and that’s fine. That’s just fine.” Needless to say, there’s no clear indication that there’s some kind of temperature plot.
