US President Joe Biden on Saturday joked about former US president Donald Trump and his own age at an annual media dinner, before unloading deadly serious criticisms of his rival in November’s election.
“One candidate’s too old and mentally unfit to be president,” the 81-year-old Democrat quipped at the Gridiron Club in Washington. “The other guy’s me.”
Biden was making his first speech as president at the annual white tie gala for the US media and political elite, an event that Trump addressed in 2018.
Photo: Bloomberg
Biden is trailing in a number of polls and faces voters concerns about his age, which he has tried to address by highlighting 77-year-old Trump’s recent verbal slip-ups.
In his remarks, Biden took a swipe at Republicans in the US Congress who have launched an impeachment inquiry into his son’s business dealings, saying they would “rather fail at impeachment than succeed at anything else.”
He added that Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, sitting at the head table with Biden on the eve of St Patrick’s Day “took one look at Congress and he asked for another Guinness.”
Varadkar and Biden pushed during a meeting at the White House on Friday for Republicans in Congress to stop blocking military aid for Ukraine to fight Russia’s invasion.
However, Biden then returned to Trump, saying that the Democrats’ election campaign would show how they rebuilt the US economy after the COVID-19 pandemic “without encouraging the American people to inject bleach.”
He was referring to an incident when Trump, as president, asked a top medical adviser whether virus victims could be injected with disinfectant to cure them.
“Look, I wish these were jokes, but they’re not,” Biden said. “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: ‘Do whatever the hell you want.’”
Noting that Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, a strong critic of Russia, was also at his table, he added: “We will not bow down. They will not bow down and I will not bow down.”
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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