Biden slams alleged Trump remarks
WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden declared President Donald Trump “unfit” for the presidency on Friday, delivering an impassioned reaction to a report that Trump allegedly mocked American war dead.
The president and his allies have dismissed the report in The Atlantic as false.
The allegations, sourced anonymously, describe multiple offensive comments by the president toward fallen and captured U.S. service-members, including calling World War I dead at an American military cemetery in France “losers” and “suckers” in 2018.
The reported comments, many of which AP confirmed independently, open a political vulnerability for the president less than two months from Election Day.
Biden told reporters that “you know in your gut” Trump’s comments, if true, are “deplorable.”
“I’ve just never been as disappointed, in my whole career, with a leader that I’ve worked with, president or otherwise,” Biden added. “If the article is true — and it appears to be, based on other things he’s said — it is absolutely damning. It is a disgrace.”
Trump, in the Oval Office, said no apology was necessary, because it was a “fake story.”
Trump was alleged to have made the comments in November 2018, as he was set to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery during a trip to France. The White House said the visit was scrubbed because foggy weather made the helicopter trip from Paris too risky and a 90-minute drive was deemed infeasible.
Returning to Washington from a Thursday visit to Pennsylvania, Trump told reporters that the Atlantic report was “a disgraceful situation” by a “terrible magazine.”
Biden’s allies seized on the reported comments in hopes that they could drive a wedge between military families and veterans and Trump.
