‘Mean guy’: Trump rips into Biden at Bible Museum for going after anti-abortion activists and Jan. 6 rioters
Donald Trump rambled and ranted about Joe Biden and a wide range of other topics as he branded his predecessor a “mean guy” during an event Monday that was supposed to be focused on religious liberty.
The president accused the man who followed and preceded him in the White House of viciously going after his political enemies, a charge that comes as Trump himself has set up his own personal team of legal experts to orchestrate politicized prosecutions of select enemies and critics that has gone after California Sen. Adam Schiff and Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve board of governors.
“People don’t realize about the Biden administration — it was a very mean administration. He’s a mean guy,” Trump told an audience of his allies, including Dr. Ben Carson and Franklin Graham. “[N]ot a smart guy. Never was, but he was a mean guy. He was a mean guy.”
This diatribe came, as the president’s off-script moments often do, as he riffed for a few moments on a line in his address highlighting a key milestone of Trump’s second term: the mass pardoning of individuals prosecuted by the Department of Justice during the last four years. That included hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters imprisoned for violence against law enforcement and other crimes during the storming of the U.S. Capitol, as well as pardoning anti-abortion campaigners convicted of harassing people outside of medical clinics.
“They were mean people, what they did to people, what they did to [January 6 protesters] what they did to so many people. They were mean people,” Trump continued. “These were really radical, horrible people. “
The president went on to claim that Biden “wasn’t that way 20 years ago,” seemingly inferring it to be a development of advanced age.
“He was never the brightest bulb in the ceiling, but he was, he was a man who wasn’t overly mean that I saw before he became really mean, and his administration was one of the meanest we’ve ever had, and that’s why they’re out of here.”
During the address, Trump also patted himself on the back for bringing the FIFA Club World Cup and the Olympics to the United States, reverting back and forth between gloating over his accomplishments and chastising his foes.
“You know, when I was president, I got, I got the World Cup, and I got the Olympics, I got, I got them to choose us Los Angeles. And I was very proud of it,” Trump boasted. “The only problem was I wasn’t going to be president, because I would have served out normally my time.
He’d go on to claim that because the 2020 election was “rigged”, he got to experience the events as president anyway. Since losing the 2020 election, Trump has falsely claimed that Biden won the race thanks to millions of illegal votes that his campaign was never able to prove in court — and which America’s election security agencies say simply did not exist.
In his remarks, Trump also commented for the first time on the stabbing death of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee living in Charlotte, North Carolina. The president told pool reporters Sunday evening upon return from the U.S. Open in New York that he would look into her case.
On Monday, he used the issue to pivot off onto promises to expand his deployment of U.S. troops to American cities in an effort to suppress crime. In Washington D.C., National Guard troops haven’t been granted law enforcement authority and are largely relegated to support and landscaping duties.
“We have to be able to handle that,” Trump said of violent crime, such as the murder of Zarutska. “If we don’t handle that, we don’t have a country.”
He also brought up a young man who claimed to have been forced by teachers to read about transgender identities in school. Ranting about transgender Americans, Trump seethed: “It’s sort of a crazy thing. It’s a world gone wrong, just a world gone wrong. And I made the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders.”
