President Joe Biden chastised former President Donald Trump, repeating his claim that the deadly Charlottesville, Virginia, riot led him to run against Trump in 2020, while in Brussels on Thursday for summits to address the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Biden attacked Trump without mentioning him by name after a reporter asked about “widespread concerns in Europe” that the 45th president or someone like him would be elected in 2024 and undermine the NATO alliance.
“I had no intention of running for president again … until I saw those folks coming out of the fields in Virginia carrying torches and carrying Nazi banners and literally singing the same vile rhyme that they used in Germany in the early ‘20s — or ‘30s, I should say,” Biden said. “And then, when the gentleman you mentioned was asked what he thought and a young woman was killed, a protester, and he asked — was asked what he thought, he said, ‘There are very good people on both sides.’ And that’s when I decided I wasn’t going to be quiet any longer.”
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Biden and many Democrats have persistently characterized Trump’s 2017 “very fine people” comment as a description of the tiki torch-wielding white nationalists at the “Unite the Right” rally during which a counterprotester was murdered.
While Trump’s response to Charlottesville was widely panned as inadequate, aides stressed that “very fine people” was a reference to neither the white nationalists nor antifa demonstrators but people on both sides of the Confederate monuments debate.
“And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally,” Trump said. “But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.” He added, “If you look, they were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. I’m sure in that group there were some bad ones.”
Biden said it was not “an illogical question” for someone to ask if Trump or a Trump-like candidate could win in 2024 but praised his own qualifications for the job and said the election was still far away. “And one of the things that I take some solace from is I don’t think you’ll find any European leader who thinks that I am not up to the job,” Biden said. “And I mean that sincerely.”
Trump said in a recent interview with the Washington Examiner that he got a “bad rap” on his handling of Russian President Vladimir Putin, arguing that his stance on NATO led to member states increasing their defense budgets.
“I got billions and billions of dollars” for NATO, he said. “Now all that money is going against Russia, so I did that. I closed the pipeline. You know, the pipeline was closed, and Biden opened it. Plus, I did the biggest sanctions anybody’s ever done on Russia.”
The former president conceded, however, that he did not believe Putin would actually order the Ukraine invasion. Trump thought Putin was massing troops along the border to extract concessions from Kyiv and the West. Still, he has regularly pointed out that the war did not happen on his watch and said he is the only recent commander in chief dating back to George W. Bush who did not preside over a Russian invasion of a neighboring country.
“I have no doubt that President Putin made his decision to ruthlessly attack Ukraine only after watching the pathetic withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month. “Yesterday, reporters asked me if I thought President Putin was smart. I said, ‘Of course he’s smart.’ … The problem is not that Putin is smart, which of course he’s smart, but the real problem is that our leaders are dumb.”
Biden, by contrast, has sought to assure allies, in a veiled shot at his predecessor, that “America is back” to leading the fight between democracy and autocracy.
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His Thursday criticism of Trump was elicited by a Der Spiegel reporter asking, after noting European concerns that Trump or someone like him would be elected president again, “Are there any steps, anything you’re trying to do and NATO is trying to do here, these days to prevent what you’re trying to do becoming undone two years from now?”
“I don’t criticize anybody for asking that question,” Biden said. “But the next election, I’d be very fortunate if I had that same man running against me.” Polls show a rematch between Biden, who would turn 82 shortly after the 2024 election, and Trump would be competitive.
