Biden Campaign: Rose Garden Speech Was A “Sad Affair”
Presumptive Democratic Nominee, Joe Biden’s campaign denounced President Trump’s Rose Garden speech on Tuesday as a “sad affair” that “says more about Donald Trump than he said about any particular topic.”
In a White House news conference that was supposed to be about the administration’s action against China regarding the country’s national security law on Hong Kong, Trump unloaded on Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, as he spoke for nearly an hour.
Trump accused the former vice president of being soft on China, failing to accomplish certain things he has criticized the Trump administration over and mentioned Biden’s son, Hunter, a central figure in the president’s impeachment trial.
CNN actually cut away from the president’s remarks, with host Wolf Blitzer saying the speech was “deteriorating” into what he described as “a campaign-type speech.”
“Today’s statement that was ostensibly supposed to be about China, but there was one topic that President Trump couldn’t seem to get off his mind: Joe Biden, whose name the President invoked nearly 30 times,” the Biden campaign’s deputy campaign manager and communications director Kate Bedingfield said in a statement.
Recent polls have shown Biden opening up a wide lead nationally and in several key swing states. On Tuesday, Trump rejected the notion that he is losing support, pointing to what he called flawed polling methods.
“Look, we won a race where it was the same thing in 2016. We had polls that were fake,” Trump said.
The Biden campaign said the president’s speech showed that he’s concerned about his prospects in November.
“What we heard in the Rose Garden today wasn’t a president at all,” Bedingfield said. “It was a politician who sees his re-election slipping away from him and who is furious that his own botched response to the coronavirus pandemic has denied him the campaign events he so craves.
“The American taxpayer should be reimbursed for the abuse of funds this spectacle represented.”