President Trump responded to the news Thursday that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden would be joining the crowded Democratic field for president, calling out his opponents for having “sick & demented ideas.”
“Welcome to the race Sleepy Joe. I only hope you have the intelligence, long in doubt, to wage a successful primary campaign. It will be nasty - you will be dealing with people who truly have some very sick & demented ideas. But if you make it, I will see you at the Starting Gate,” Mr. Trump tweeted.
Mr. Biden called out the president’s response to the Charlottesville riots in his announcement video, where Mr. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
“With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those who had the courage to stand against it, and in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike anything I had seen in this lifetime,” Mr. Biden said.
“We are in the battle for the soul of this nation,” he added.
The vice president continued to make his case in the video.
“I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an abhorrent moment in time, but if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. Who we are. and I cannot standby and watch that happen,” the Delaware Democrat said.
Mr. Biden became the 20th high-profile Democrat to enter the already crowded field to challenge Mr. Trump in the 2020 election.
While the former vice president wasn’t successful in his bids for president in 1988 and 2008, Mr. Biden has consistently been the front-runner in polls, sometimes double digits ahead of second-place Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont.
• Bailey Vogt can be reached at bvogt@washingtontimes.com.
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