In private, President Joe Biden reportedly uses highly descriptive and flowery language to describe Donald Trump.
President JOE BIDEN has a reputation for salty language behind closed doors. But it nearly slipped out in public during his speech at Valley Forge last month to mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Animated and angry, he derided DONALD TRUMP and his followers for drawing glee from political violence.
“At his rally, he jokes about an intruder, whipped up by the Big Trump Lie, taking a hammer to Paul Pelosi’s skull,” Biden said.
“And he thinks that’s funny,” the president continued. “He laughed about it. What a sick …”
Biden let his voice trail off as the crowd cheered and chuckled.
In private, he doesn’t stop short.
The president has described Trump to longtime friends and close aides as a “sick f**k” who delights in others’ misfortunes, according to three people who have heard the president use the profane description. According to one of the people who has spoken with the president, Biden recently said of Trump: “What a f**king a**hole the guy is.”
The White House declined to comment.
On this, President Biden is absolutely correct.
In examining his overall pattern of behavior across decades of public and private life, many of America’s and the world’s leading mental health professionals have concluded that Donald Trump is likely a sociopath if not a psychopath. He also possesses a deep attraction to and fascination with violence. He is also a masterful liar and expert in cruelty. Trump, a 77-year-old man with multiple federal indictments from Queens, New York apparently believes that he is some type of prophet or chosen one, anointed by “god” and “Jesus Christ” to be the country’s first dictator. These are just a few of the many examples of Trump’s extremely aberrant behavior. Ultimately, Trump can reasonably be described as evil.
Donald Trump and his apparatchiks, of course, decided to turn Biden’s truth-telling into an opportunity to get more money from his MAGA cult members. In a fundraising email, Trump shared how Biden’s description of him was very insulting and hurtful not just to him but for his MAGA people as well. The almost indescribably corrupt ex-president needs their healing love – in the form of money.
BIDEN JUST CALLED ME A SICK F-WORD!
Friend, but you know he doesn’t just think that about me, he thinks that about EVERY SINGLE ONE of my proud supporters.
HE THINKS THAT ABOUT YOU!
Hillary Clinton calls us deplorables.
Biden will spit on us & call us every curse word in the dictionary.
BUT I WILL NEVER STOP LOVING YOU BECAUSE YOU LOVE AMERICA!
And I know with your patriotic support at this very moment, WE WILL STOP HIM!
Before the day is over, I’m calling on EVERY PATRIOT reading this message to chip in and say, I LOVE PRESIDENT TRUMP!
I LOVE PRESIDENT TRUMP
If you stand with me now, we’ll be the ones laughing on Election Day.
Please join me today.
Based on the many tens of millions of dollars that the MAGA cultists have already given their Dear Leader, it would appear that they are very eager to show him such love even if he uses their money to pay for his huge legal fees and other personal expenses.
Never to be overlooked, these shouts of umbrage and personal offense are coming from a man who attempted a coup on Jan. 6 and incited a lethal attack on the Capitol by his followers, publicly admires murderous dictators and tyrants such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, threatens to have his “enemies” punished for disloyalty (in Trump’s mind he is the state and opposing him is “treason”), mocks the disabled, has been credibly accused of rape and sexual assault by E. Jean Carroll and more than a dozen other women, allegedly has unprotected sex with adult film stars shortly after his wife has just given birth, and uses stochastic terrorism to encourage violence by his MAGA people and other supporters against their shared “enemies."
Tediously and predictably, there are mainstream professional “the View From Nowhere” centrist news media types, a group that for more than seven years has mostly been normalizing Trump and Trumpism and his vile behavior (That is just Trump being Trump! He is a unique figure! A populist!) who are tut-tutting and criticizing President Biden for daring to using profanity to describe his predecessor, the only such person to have ever attempted a coup against his own country. At the New Republic, Michael Tomasky pushes back against such performative offense:
The White House declined to comment for the record, but this was obviously put out there by administration sources just to test the reaction. Well, here’s mine: Biden should just go ahead and say it publicly. Not all the time of course. But once or twice. It won’t hurt. Most likely it will help. Might help a lot, in fact.
This is so for two basic reasons that people in politics sometimes forget about inside their pressure bubbles. The first is that it’s genuine. If it’s what he thinks, then he ought to just own it. People hear politicians calibrate their words every day (well, except Trump, but even he does it sometimes, notably with respect to a federal abortion ban). To hear someone just let it rip is refreshing.
Reason two? A hell of a lot of people agree. The ones who don’t are loud and enraged, and they command not one but three propaganda television networks (Fox, One America, Newsmax). But I’m betting that your average American—middle class, not very political, guided by conventional morals and values, not angry at either Taylor Swift or Travis Kelce—thinks Donald Trump is a sick fuck….
This campaign—and not panicking about January’s head-to-head polls—is going to be an exercise in reminding those voters of the things they hated about Trump.
In the Age of Trump especially, American politics closely resembles professional wrestling. When viewed through that framework, Trump is the so-called heel, the villain who will lie, cheat and steal to win. Biden, on the other hand, is the “baby face" good guy and hero who stands up for what is right and good. But even the baby face must get some fire and start to cut some searing promos – which we saw from President Biden during his speech at Valley Forge several weeks ago – if he or she wants to keep the people behind them and get the fuel they need to decisively beat the heel.
Writing at the Guardian, David Smith described Biden’s recent Valley Forge speech in a tone that in more normal times would have been a better fit for a boxing magazine or the sports section of the newspaper than for a presidential campaign speech:
This time it’s personal. On Friday Joe Biden tore into his predecessor Donald Trump as never before. He brimmed with anger, disdain and contempt. He apparently had to stop himself from swearing. So much for “when they go low, we go high” – and plenty of Democrats will be just fine with that.
If Biden was seeking to jolt his half-conscious 2024 re-election campaign into life, this may have done the trick. The palpable loathing of Trump took a good 10 or 20 years off him. Keep hating like this and he might do a Benjamin Button all the way to election day.
There is no better illustration of Biden’s evolution than a speech he delivered on the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. On that occasion, he denounced a “web of lies” but never mentioned Trump by name, preferring to cite the “former president”. Those were still the days when he would talk about “the former guy” and get a laugh.
Two years on, in an address near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Biden spoke the name “Trump” more than 40 times in less than an hour as he warned that his likely 2024 opponent would sacrifice American democracy to put himself in power. The 81-year-old president generally seems like a grandfatherly figure predisposed to give people the benefit of the doubt, which makes his detestation of Trump all the more striking.
Journalists such as Salon's Brian Karem have repeatedly expressed their deep concern that the president has been mostly kept away from the public and not allowed to speak enough with the news media in environments that are not carefully controlled and choreographed. The sum effect has been that Biden is not taking advantage of the uniquely powerful bully pulpit that is the presidency, which has put him at a disadvantage in terms of agenda setting and overall messaging against Trump and the Republicans and their vast propaganda disinformation machine.
Biden also needs to make much more use of his spokespeople and other advocates. (In professional wrestling, managers are often used to help otherwise talented performers who lack the gift of gab; a talented manager can also help their client to develop the confidence to become better “talkers” themselves).
Biden has an amazing gift, learned through great personal tragedy, of being able to empathize with other human beings in a deep way. President Biden’s phone call to the family of US Army soldier Specialist Kennedy Landon Sanders (posthumously promoted to the rank of Sergeant), who, along with two other soldiers, was killed in the line of duty last weekend in Jordan, being one such example. By comparison, Donald Trump believes that American soldiers who die or are wounded for their country are “suckers” and “losers.”
The Democrats are presenting the 2024 election as an existential choice between democracy and tyranny. If they truly believe this, then it is essential that they follow through accordingly by unleashing President Biden and his spokespeople to tell bold, direct, and uncompromising truths about Dictator Trump and the extreme harm that he and his MAGA movement and the other neofascists will do to the American people. Channeling the late great actor Carl Weathers in the Rocky films, if Trump and the Republican fascists win the 2024 election, there is no tomorrow for American democracy. President Biden and the Democrats and their voters must fight back with everything they have because Trump and his forces are holding nothing back.
