Trump's ongoing obsession with Biden reaches pathetic new low
President Donald Trump laid bare his endless obsession with former President Joe Biden on Wednesday in a petty display.
“Jimmy Carter died a happy man. You know why?” a tired-sounding Trump asked reporters in his newly gilded and gaudy Oval Office. “Because he wasn't the worst president. Joe Biden was.”
The sad attempt at an insult is just the latest example of Trump’s fixation on the former president who wiped the floor with him by over 7 million votes in the 2020 election. Trump’s deep-seated resentment of the man who booted him from the White House has clearly fueled his penchant to make Biden the go-to excuse for his current administration’s awful performance.
Trump’s trade war gambit has been disastrous, with no end in sight to the economic upheaval, and the wannabe autocrat has resorted to increasingly desperate attempts to blame Biden for the chaos. In March, Trump pushed a conspiracy theory claiming Biden used an autopen to sign official documents, rendering the pardons he signed during his last days in office null and void. But within 24 hours, Trump admitted that he used an autopen to sign official documents too.
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In fact, Trump has used his autopen to sign a slew of executive orders rolling back Biden-era policies on the environment, civil rights, and labor protections. Trump’s bitterness toward Biden has even extended to revoking security clearances and protection details for the former president’s family members.
Trump clawed his way back into the White House by beating Vice President Kamala Harris at the ballot box in 2024. But even in the wake of that victory, Trump used his awful first speech in front of a joint session of Congress to keep obsessing about Biden, mentioning him 13 times and blaming him for just about every ill that Trump and his co-President Elon Musk were raring to turn into a catastrophe.
It’s worth noting that in both his 2016 and 2024 election victories, Trump failed to secure the majority of the popular vote, receiving less than 50% each time. And even though Trump received more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020, he still fell short of Biden’s 2020 tally by around 4 million votes.
That’s got to sting.