Joe Biden tore into Donald Trump’s mental stability at a dinner in Washington DC on Saturday – just as the former president was making verbal gaffes at a campaign rally in Ohio as well as, during remarks on the economy and auto industry, predicting a “bloodbath” for the country if he met defeat in November’s election.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, confused the crowd at an appearance in Vandalia by insisting that Biden had beaten “Barack Hussein Obama” in elections nationally that never took place.
Freewheeling during a speech in which his teleprompters were seemingly disabled by high winds, Trump – a frequent critic of the 81-year-old Biden’s age and mental acuity – struggled to pronounce the words “bite” and “largest”. And he left the crowd scratching their heads over the reference to Obama, whom Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017 before taking the Oval Office from Trump in 2020.
“You know what’s interesting? Joe Biden won against Barack Hussein Obama. Has anyone ever heard of him? Every swing state, Biden beat Obama but in every other state, he got killed,” Trump said.
Biden joked about Trump’s mental fitness at Saturday night’s Gridiron club dinner, a traditional “roast” attended by politicians and journalists dating to the 1880s.
“One candidate is too old and mentally unfit to be president. The other one is me,” the president said.
“Don’t tell him. He thinks he’s running against Barack Obama, that’s what he said,” Biden added, referring to several previous occasions when the 77-year-old Trump has confused the incumbent and presumptive 2024 opponent with his Democratic predecessor.
Trump’s Ohio address, ostensibly in support of Bernie Moreno, his preferred candidate in the state’s Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, also saw the former president returning to darker, more apocalyptic themes.
The US, Trump insisted during comments about the auto workers and the car industry, was headed for “a bloodbath” if he was rejected again at the polls in favor of Biden.
“Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country,” he said, without clarifying what he meant.
Later, he added: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country, if we don’t win this election … certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”
His comments prompted a statement from Biden’s re-election campaign that said “this is who Donald Trump is”.
A Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said: “He wants another January 6, but the American people are going to give him another electoral defeat this November because they continue to reject his extremism, his affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge.”
Two Republicans who have been critical of Trump, however, came to his defense. The Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday: “You could also look at the definition of bloodbath and it could be an economic disaster. And so if he’s speaking about the auto industry, in particular in Ohio, then you can take it a little bit more context.”
Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice-president who this week refused to endorse his candidacy, made a similar argument. “[He] was clearly talking about the impact of imports devastating the American automotive industry,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation.
Trump later claimed on his Truth Social platform that he “was simply referring to imports” allowed by Biden which the former president argued were “killing the automotive industry”. Additionally, Trump’s statement on Truth alluded to how the United Auto Workers’ “leadership” had endorsed Biden’s re-election campaign despite his boasts that car manufacturing would thrive “like never before” if he were chosen for a second presidency.
On Monday, Trump furthermore sent an email accusing those criticizing his bloodbath of lies while simultaneously appealing for donations to his campaign.
Also during his speech, repeating unsubstantiated claims that foreign countries were “emptying” their prisons and mental institutions into the US, Trump took a familiar swipe at immigrants, calling some of them “animals”.
“I don’t know if you call them people. They’re not people, in my opinion,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”
Moreno, a Colombian immigrant who made a fortune from his car dealerships, joined in the nationalistic rhetoric, demanding that anybody who comes to the US learned to speak English.
“We don’t need to vote in five different languages. We learn the language,” he said. “It means you assimilate. You become part of America – America doesn’t become part of you.”
At other times during an often wild 90-minute address, Trump tossed out personal insults at political opponents. He called Biden “stupid” several times; made a vulgar reference to the first name of Fani Willis, the Georgia prosecutor in his criminal case for trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat; called the Democratic California governor, Gavin Newsom, “new-scum”; and attacked the personal appearance of JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, the New York Times reported.
He also attempted to blame the installation of the troublesome teleprompters on Biden, and he urged the event organizers not to pay the contractors.
Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former US House speaker, condemned Trump’s comments during a Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.
“You wouldn’t even allow him in your house, much less in the White House,” she said.
“We just have to win this election, because he’s even predicting a bloodbath. What does that mean, he’s going to exact a bloodbath? There’s something wrong here. How respectful I am of the American people and their goodness, but how much more do they have to see from him to understand that this isn’t what our country is about?”
Biden echoed the warnings during the non-comedic section of his address to the Gridiron dinner, attended by more than 650 guests, continuing to refuse to use Trump’s name, and calling him only “my predecessor”.
“We live in an unprecedented moment in democracy,” Biden said. “An unprecedented moment for history. Democracy and freedom are literally under attack. [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s on the march in Europe. My predecessor bows down to him and says to him, ‘do whatever the hell you want.’
“Freedom is under assault. The freedom to vote, the freedom to choose and so much more. The lies about the 2020 election, the plot to overturn it, to embrace the January 6 insurrection, pose the greatest threat to our democracy since the civil war.
“We live in an unprecedented moment of democracy, an unprecedented moment in history. Democracy and freedom are literally under attack.”
