Donald Trump has branded Joe Biden a “broken down pile of c**p” and Vice President Kamala Harris “pathetic” as he claims the embattled president has already quit the White House race.
In a video posted to his Truth Social platform, the Republican presidential candidate is seen slouched behind the wheel of a golf buggy alongside his teenage son Barron Trump and declaring to an unidentified third party: “How did I do with the debate the other night? I kicked that old, broken down pile of c**p.
“He just quit, you know – he’s quitting the race… and that means we have Kamala. I think she’s going to be better,” Trump mutters sarcastically.
Trump goes on to lay into Harris, deriding the prospect of her succeeding Biden on the ticket.
“She’s so pathetic, she’s so f***ing bad. Can you imagine… dealing with [Vladimir] Putin, the president of China – who’s a fierce person, he’s a fierce man, a very tough guy…” he adds, before driving off across the green.
Trump, 78, has largely managed to resist the lure of the limelight in recent days, somewhat allowing the crisis engulfing the Democratic Party after Biden’s disastrous debate performance to play out naturally.
In what marked the first debate of the election season, Biden, 81, took to the stage in Atlanta, Georgia, looking stiff and frail, lacking in energy and speaking in a hoarse, rasping voice – while losing his train of thought at several points.
His answers to questions were meandering and occasionally incoherent and at least once he entirely lost the thread of what he was saying, trailing off before mistakenly declaring: “We finally beat Medicare.”
Trump pounced on that error by saying Biden had “beaten it to death” and elsewhere claimed triumphantly: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
The White House subsequently attributed Biden’s dismal performance to a cold while he has now blamed jet lag after a gruelling travel schedule prior to the debate.
But the debate plunged the party into crisis, sparking calls for Biden to step aside as the Democratic party nominee to make way for a rising star like Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
After conferring with his family at Camp David in Maryland over the weekend, the president has since spent the week struggling to firefight the panic among Democrats.
With pollsters reporting support nosediving in swing states, Biden hosted a call with campaign staff on Wednesday in which he declared: “Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can, as simply and straightforward as I can: I am running.
“No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving. I’m in this race to the end and we’re going to win.”
He also held a meeting with 24 Democratic state governors, to reassure them that he can still beat Trump and remains the right person to lead the party into November’s election.
After that meeting, Kathy Hochul, Wes Moore and Tim Walz, the governors of New York, Maryland and Minnesota respectively, told reporters that their confidence in Biden was restored and insisted: “We have his back.”
Newsom and Whitmer posted similarly-worded messages of support for the president on social media.
