Vice President Joe Biden admitted Thursday that not all Democrats are happy with Hillary Clinton, but said she’s still a much better alternative than Donald Trump.
“I know some of you are mad at Hillary… but let me tell you something, she never yields, she doesn’t break, she gets it,” he said at a campaign stop for Clinton in Ohio.
“Do you think there’s any possibility that Donald Trump would do anything other than continue to try to break the labor movement, all kidding aside?” he asked.
Democrats are coming off a bruising primary season in which millions voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders, and warned that Clinton is in the tank for big banks and big business. But Biden played her up as someone with a blue-collar past, and noted that her father worked at a Scranton lace factory once.
“He worked at Scranton Lace at the loom – this is a guy who busted his rear end,” he said. “…Hillary understands these struggles, she understands that middle class is not a number.”
He also talked about Clinton’s support for making college more affordable and accessible and for providing a safety net for the elderly to ensure that “your kids never have to take care of you.”
“That’s middle class – this is what these guys don’t get,” he said.
“For all the criticism of Hillary, she gets it in her gut,” he said. “That’s what made us the most unique country in the world – that sense that it’s more than just about that one person and it’s all about just that one person.”
Biden also fired at Trump during his remarks, and cast him as a billionaire real estate tycoon who is both dangerous on an international stage and completely out of touch with the budget issues middle-class Americans face.
“My biggest problem with Donald Trump is not his cockamamie policies, it’s the way he treats people,” Biden said. “Think about growing up in your house and over your kitchen table, whether you would ever treat people like he does … [what would happen] if you talked about how cool it was that John down the street got fired, a phrase he made famous.”
Biden also talked about his own hard-scrabble childhood growing up in Scranton, Pa., and said Trump doesn’t have the background to appreciate what working-class people go through.
“I’m so sick of hearing people like Trump and the U.S. Chamber [say] that you get paid too much. Give me a break. This is a guy who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth who is getting it caught in his throat because that’s where his foot is.”
Trump would also create a foreign policy risk for the U.S., Biden argued. He noted Trump’s threat not to live up to the U.S. commitment under NATO to protect the Baltic states from Russia, and his suggestion that North Korea should build a nuclear weapon, as examples that show Trump is “uninformed.”
“I don’t believe the guy is a bad guy,” Biden said. “I just think he’s totally completely, uninformed – he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”
“Just imagine giving this guy access,” he told the crowd. “No, no, no I really mean it – giving this guy access to the nuclear codes, a guy who says I would consider [using] nuclear weapons, who talks about maybe other countries should become nuclear…”
“The Trump world is already making us less safe,” he argued.
