The Trump campaign is sharpening its attacks on Joe Biden as both camps prepare for a general election complicated by the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump aides on Thursday jumped on Biden for telling supporters during a Wednesday virtual “happy hour” that he became a “professor” after he left the U.S. Senate.
The former vice president has earned $371,159 a year as the University of Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin presidential practice professor since he joined the faculty in 2017 — the Obama administration ended on Jan. 20 of that year. Delaware’s former 36-year senator has been criticized by students and the local press for the limited work he’s done on campus.
“Sadly, this isn’t the first time Biden blacked out the eight years of the Obama presidency. In September, he referred to George W. Bush as ‘the last president,'” Trump spokeswoman Abigail Marone wrote in an email.
Marone added, “He’s not playing with a full deck, folks.”
Trump and Biden’s salvos have escalated as the two-term vice president homes in on the 1,991 pledged delegates required to secure the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination outright. This week, they’ve more publicly clashed over the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 public health and economic fallouts.
Trump name-checked Biden during a Fox News town hall, calling him “Sleepy Joe” and claiming he didn’t know what “xenophobic” meant as the White House incumbent complained about being described as a “racist” for imposing virus-related travel bans on China.
“What a piece of work,” the former senator said.
The Trump campaign is also threatening legal action against a Biden super PAC, Unite the Country, after it launched a 30-second advertisement in which a voice-over accuses the president of allowing the novel respiratory illness to “spread unchecked across America.”
Republicans and Biden critics have clung onto his verbal flubs throughout this cycle’s primary process as an indication of his old age and slipping mental faculties.
