President Joe Biden launched a wide-ranging attack on former President Donald Trump on Thursday, warning that his predecessor is a threat to American democracy and drawing a sharp distinction between himself and his likely 2024 election opponent.
To make his most extensive critique of Trump this year, Biden, a Democrat, chose an event to honor the late Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a former presidential candidate, fighter pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war whom Trump had denounced as "not a war hero."
"There is something dangerous happening in America," Biden said. In a speech at the Tempe Center for the Arts in Arizona, a likely battleground state in 2024, Biden maintained that Trump had suggested in recent weeks that the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves be killed and the Department of Justice defunded.
Biden also recalled remarks that Trump reportedly made after he abandoned a plan to visit an American military cemetery outside of Paris in 2018. The Atlantic reported at the time that Trump had called the war dead "suckers" and "losers," comments that Trump denied vigorously.
"Is John a sucker?" Biden said of McCain, then posed the same question about his son, Beau Biden, who, like McCain, died of brain cancer, which Biden believes his son contracted from military service near an Iraqi burn pit.
Trump's official campaign social media account on Thursday posted a Washington Examiner story disputing the Atlantic reporting.
Biden drew a sharp contrast between his own beliefs and those of Trump, who has said he considered himself above the U.S. Constitution, the founding documents that lay out a system of checks and balances.
"I believe very strongly that the defining feature of our democracy is our Constitution," the president said. "I believe in free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power."
Asked about Biden's speech, Trump's campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said, "the radical Left Democrats, now led by Crooked Joe Biden, are the greatest threat to democracy the United States of America has ever faced."
Biden said he does not think all Republicans ascribe to the "MAGA" agenda, a reference to Trump's Make America Great Again slogan. But he said, "there is no question that today's Republican Party is driven and intimidated by MAGA Republican extremists." Biden's message is likely to be repeated often in a campaign race dominated by the Democrat incumbent and the Republican former president.
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