After mounting criticism that Joe Biden wasn’t attacking Donald Trump enough, the president went after his likely 2024 opponent with gusto on Tuesday.
“There’s a lot of reasons to be against Donald Trump,” Biden said at a fundraiser in San Francisco, several outlets reported. “But damn, he shouldn’t be president.”
Biden accused Trump of invoking Nazi-like terminology when he recently called his opponents on the left “vermin” to be rooted out and said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Biden said at the event, “Again, echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.”
On Nancy Pelosi’s home turf, the president ripped Trump for making light of the hammer attack on the former speaker’s husband, Paul Pelosi, who testified in court about the incident this week.
“On more than one occasion in recent weeks, he’s made a joke about the assaults on Nancy Pelosi’s husband,” Biden said. “There’s no place in America for political violence.”
Biden also revived a nickname he gave Trump to criticise his jobs record.
“That’s why now and then we remember him as Donald Hoover Trump,” Biden said, referring to President Herbert Hoover, who was in office at the beginning of the Great Depression.
Biden has said that Trump and Hoover were the only presidents who left office with fewer jobs in the U.S. than when they began.
The president also took a victory lap for Democratic wins in last week’s election, which included bolstered protections for abortion rights. “A pretty good day for Joe,” he said.
“Folks, this is the Biden-Harris agenda,” he said, per CNN. “And that agenda not only is popular, people are voting for it, winning elections over and over again. The press and pundits can keep being surprised as much as they want. But since I came off the sidelines to go toe-to-toe with Donald Trump, we haven’t stopped running, and he hasn’t stopped losing.”
He continued, “Remember when Trump told us he was going to win so much, we’d get tired of winning? Oh, man. I shouldn’t get started. Let me tell you one thing is true. We got tired of Trump. Truth is, the guy can’t get tired of losing.”