President Donald Trump slammed former Vice President Joe Biden on June 11, calling him mentally weak.
“I heard Biden who is a loser. I mean look, Joe never got more than 1 percent,” Trump told reporters in Washington, referring to Biden’s two failed presidential runs.
“It looks like he’s failing, it looks like his friends from the left are going to overtake him pretty soon.”
Responding to reports that Biden was going to mention Trump 76 times in his speech on Tuesday and alluding to Biden’s reversals of longheld stances, the president added: “When a man has to mention my name 76 times in his speech, that means he’s in trouble. He’s a different guy. He looks different than he used to. He acts different than he used to.”
“I’d rather run against, I think, Biden than anybody. I think he’s the weakest mentally and I think Joe is weak mentally. The others have much more energy,” Trump said. “I call him ‘1 percent Joe’ because until Obama came along he didn’t do very well.”
The president made the remarks before traveling to Iowa to speak at a GOP fundraiser in Des Moines. Biden was also set to speak in Iowa on Tuesday.
The Anti-Trump CNN network was given a leaked copy earlier Tuesday of Biden’s prepared speech in which he disparaged Trump and his policies again and again.
In one portion of the remarks, Biden said that “America’s farmers have been crushed by his tariff war with China.”
“He thinks he’s being tough. Well, it’s easy to be tough when someone else is feeling the pain. How many farmers across this state and across this nation have had to face the prospect of losing their business, of losing their farm because of Trump’s tariffs? How many have had to stare at the ceiling at night wondering how they’re going to make it?” Biden was going to say.
Biden also claimed that Trump’s tariffs were hurting manufacturing across the country and that his threat of tariffs against Mexico yielded no new deal, despite Trump’s assertation that it did.
Reversing himself on his stance on China, Biden was prepared to tell the crowd that “We are in a competition with China” and “We need to get tough with China,” which, he argued, Trump is not doing. Biden said recently that China was “not competition” and said there was no danger in the country overtaking America as the world’s largest economy.
“They can’t even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west,” Biden said earlier this month. “They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system. I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not, they’re not competition for us.”
Biden was also going to repeat a smear against Trump that he did not condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia last year and contrast him with Obama, who the former VP recently called his “best friend.”
“I want to say something that we don’t say enough as a party—or a nation: Barack Obama was a President of extraordinary character and decency. He was a president our kids could look up to,” Biden’s speech read. “I was proud of the work we did together—from the Recovery Act to the Auto Rescue to Health Care—but I was most proud of the man he was.”
