CONCORD, N.H. — President Joe Biden tore into his predecessor on Tuesday, suggesting that global leaders are terrified of what Donald Trump’s return to the White House could do to democratic rule around the world.
“Every international meeting I attend,” Biden said, specifically referencing his whirlwind trip to Germany last week, “They pull me aside - one leader after the other, quietly - and say, ‘Joe, he can’t win.’ My democracy is at stake.”
His voice rising, Biden then asked if, “America walks away, who leads the world? Who? Name me a country.”
His comments came during what was supposed to be a rather staid speech on health care in New Hampshire. They were a dose of unfiltered politics at an event otherwise focused on Biden’s policy legacy with the race to replace him just two weeks from concluding - and they made clear that the president also sees not having Trump succeed him as an important piece of how he might go down in history.
After the speech, Biden went to a campaign office to support New Hampshire Democratic candidates and continued his broadsides against Trump, even saying at one point, “We’ve got to lock him up” - which some Harris supporters have yelled of Trump during her rallies.
But Biden then quickly added, “Lock him out, that’s what I mean.”
He didn’t mention Vice President Kamala Harris, who has replaced him at the top of the Democratic ticket. Instead, he further criticized Trump for bragging about being friends with Russian President Vladimir Putin and joked that Trump “believes in the free press like I believe I can climb Mt. Everest.”
He said Trump and supporters of his “Make America Great Again” movement have “anti-democratic” attitudes toward the way the Constitution functions and “virtually no regard for the Constitution.”
“Think about what happens if Donald Trump were to win this election. He’s not joking about it, he’s deadly earnest,” Biden said, adding, “It’s a serious, serious problem” and “we must, we must win.”
At another point Biden declared: “No president has ever been like this guy. He’s a genuine threat to our democracy.”
Biden appeared in New Hampshire’s capital with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the last candidate Biden beat to win the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. They were together at Concord Community College to trumpet a new report by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that almost 1.5 million Medicare enrollees saved nearly $1 billion on prescription drugs during the first half of the year.
Much of those savings came as a result of a cap on out-of-pocket drug costs created by the sweeping climate and health care law that the Biden administration helped carry through Congress in 2022. It put an annual maximum of $3,500 that recipients of Medicare, the government’s health insurance coverage plans for seniors, pay for their prescriptions while making recommended vaccines for older Americans, like immunization for shingles, free.
Biden said in his speech that seniors aren’t the only ones benefitting from the savings: “It’s also saving taxpayers billions of dollars.”
Next year, the drug cost cap for Medicare recipients falls to $2,000 per year, which will save some of the sickest Americans more. But the change has come at a price for others – it’s contributed to rising drug plan premiums that the government has tried to keep down by paying insurers billions of dollars from the Medicare trust fund. Still, some insurers have raised plan prices significantly – or pulled plans from markets.
The legislation is expected to deliver major savings in other ways, though, for taxpayers and Medicare enrollees in the long term.
For the first time ever, the federal government will negotiate the price of 10 of Medicare’s costliest drugs. The negotiated list prices, announced in August, will take effect in 2026. Taxpayers spend more than $50 billion yearly on the 10 drugs, which include popular blood thinners Xarelto and Eliquis and diabetes drugs Jardiance and Januvia.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicare drug pricing negotiations will save taxpayers $3.7 billion in the first year.
• Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Amanda Seitz and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.
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