Former President Donald Trump, speaking in Philadelphia Saturday just days after the news broke that independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Green Party candidate Jill Stein would not qualify for next week's CNN debate, tore into Kennedy, calling him a "total fake."
"He's more liberal than Joe Biden and all of these communists that work for him," Trump told the rally at Temple University in Philadelphia, which aired live on Newsmax and simulcast on the Newsmax2 online streaming platform. "He wants to be in the debate, but he's got bad numbers."
Trump said he'd like to have Kennedy take the stage with him and Biden next Thursday, but "I don't think he's ever going to make it."
Trump also railed about the debate itself, saying CNN has "taken so much fun out of it."
"There's no audience," he said. "They actually wanted us to sit down. I said, 'Look, I really want to do this thing.' ... What happened is they gave me something that couldn't be accepted."
He also said that with only him and Biden there to speak with moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, "it's like death."
"There's only two of us and two of them," Trump said. "This could be the most boring, or it could be quite exciting. Who knows?"
He also asked the audience how he should handle Biden.
"Should I be tough and nasty or should I just say you're the worst president in history or should I be nice and calm and let him speak?" Trump asked.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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