Biden: ‘Everything’ Trump ‘Says and Has Done Encourages White Supremacy’
Democratic front-runner Joe Biden said Thursday that he believes “everything” President Trump “says and has done encourages white supremacy.”
“I believe everything the president says and has done encourages white supremacy, and I’m not sure there’s much of a distinction,” Biden told reporters after his remarks at the Iowa State Fair. “Whether he is or is not a white supremacist, he encourages them — everything he does — he speaks to them, he’s afraid to take them on.”
“If you notice, the one time he used the word white supremacy, he was — talk about sleepy – he was awful sleepy in the way in which he talked about it,” Biden said, in an apparent reference to Trump’s derogatory nickname for him, “Sleepy Joe.”
Biden also confronted a Trump supporter at the fair who accused him of misquoting Trump’s remarks on the deadly violence that took place at the 2017 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
“He walked out and he said, let’s get this straight, he said there were ‘very fine people’ in both groups. They’re chanting anti-Semitic slogans, carrying flags,” Biden told the man.
During a press conference after the Charlottesville rally, Trump condemned racism, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists, but said, “You also had some very fine people on both sides” of the rally.
Biden currently leads the crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa, with the support of 28 percent of likely Iowa caucusgoers, according to a Monmouth University poll published Thursday. Senator Elizabeth Warren has gained twelve points in the poll since April and now sits in second, at 19 percent support.
