Joe Biden cried at a Delaware campaign fundraiser and said he is preparing for an “ugly” fight against President Trump in a general election.
“This is going to be really difficult,” Biden said Tuesday in Wilmington, Delaware, according to a pool report. “But we’re strong. The whole family is strong. I don’t take well to bullies.”
The former vice president and his son Hunter Biden, 49, are a key element of the impeachment proceedings against Trump due to Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma while Joe Biden spearheaded U.S. policy toward Ukraine. Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate the arrangement, prompting House Democrats to pursue impeachment on the basis of abusing power to influence a foreign government to harm a political rival.
Biden, 77, said that while there are “so many enticing nicknames” he could give Trump, he will not give the president a nickname, as Trump does for his rivals. “The one nickname I’m looking forward to give him is former President Donald Trump,” he said.
About a minute into his speech, Biden cried and dabbed his eye, explaining that he was “little emotional” being back in the state that he represented in the Senate for 36 years and among those who stood by him when there was a “target” on him early in his campaign.
“The way the African American community has stuck by me in this state is absolutely amazing,” Biden said, referencing scrutiny over his work with segregationist senators in the 1970s. California Sen. Kamala Harris, who ended her presidential bid earlier this month, criticized Biden in a June presidential primary debate for his opposition to busing.
“They sent the national press here,” he explained. “And they actually sent a group of reporters, eight of them, and they were very, very hostile. New, young reporters who didn’t know much about me.”
Biden said the reporters learned that Wilmington residents like and support him. “A lot of the new, and totally understandable, reporters don’t have any idea what the context was, what things looked like here with busing,” Biden said. “You all vouched for me, and it made a gigantic difference.”
Delaware Gov. John Carney and the Delaware congressional delegation, Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester and Sens. Tom Carper and Chris Coons, hosted the fundraiser of about 380 people, where tickets ranged from $100 to $2,800.
John Burris, a Republican former Delaware state representative who ran against Biden for Senate in 1984, also attended the fundraiser, which Biden used as an opportunity to praise the bipartisanship spirit in the state.
“There is a Delaware way,” Biden said. “It fades every once in a while, but it’s still here in Delaware.”
“I know some of my opponents in the primary, and they’re all good people, say that’s naive,” Biden said on his vision to pull the country together. “But I refuse to accept the notion that we can’t unite this country.”
