President Trump accused former Vice President Joe Biden Thursday of being “against God.”
“He’s following the radical left agenda,” Trump said at an Ohio event. “Take away your guns, destroy your Second Amendment, no religion, no anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy, our kind of energy.”
Trump’s comments came as he addressed workers at the Whirlpool factory near Cleveland. He added that Biden’s stances against “guns, oil and gas, religion, Bible” doom him to failure in states such as Ohio and Texas, which many commentators have speculated may be in play in 2020.
Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates responded in a statement saying that Biden’s faith “is at the core of who he is” and that Trump regularly misuses religion.
“Donald Trump is the only president to have tear-gassed peaceful Americans and thrown a priest out of his church just so he could profane it — and a Bible — for his own cynical optics as he sought to tear our nation apart at a moment of crisis and pain,” he said.
Biden poked fun at Trump for the Bible incident, in which the president held up the holy book at a photo-op in an effort to quell riots in June, joking that he wished Trump would “open it.”
“He could learn something,” the former vice president said.
The Trump campaign in recent weeks has upped its attacks on Biden’s attitude toward religion, criticizing the former vice president in particular for his positions on the Hyde Amendment and the Supreme Court’s Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania decision. The Hyde Amendment bars federally funded abortions. The Supreme Court ruled that the Little Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns, does not have to follow an Obama-era contraception mandate.
Biden has spoken out against both.
Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday criticized Biden for professing a personal faith while not supporting the Hyde Amendment or the Little Sisters. He compared Biden’s record with that of Trump, who has vocally defended both.
Pence said that the 2020 election is a moral choice about whether or not “America remains America.”
