Joe Biden’s aides want President Trump to pay back taxpayers for campaigning from the White House’s Rose Garden.
Biden spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield said Trump’s speech Tuesday sounded more like a politician who sees “his re-election slipping away” than that of a president. She added he seemed frustrated he can’t host large, boisterous rallies because of his “botched response” to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The American taxpayer should be reimbursed for the abuse of funds this spectacle represented,” Bedingfield wrote in a statement.
Trump spent most of his hourlong address, meant to tout tough new measures his administration’s taking against China for its crackdown on Hong Kong, skewering Biden for being dragged to the political left by the likes of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“Today’s statement that was ostensibly supposed to be about China, but there was one topic that President Trump couldn’t seem to get off his mind: Joe Biden, whose name the President invoked nearly 30 times,” Bedingfield continued. “The whole sad affair says more about Donald Trump than he said about any particular topic.”
The president isn’t restricted by the Hatch Act. That 1939 law bans government employees from using their jobs to advocate for or against political candidates. But custom dictates incumbent Oval Office occupants limit their swipes at opponents to when they’re outside the executive compound and on their campaign’s time and money.
On Tuesday, Trump signed the Hong Kong Autonomy Act into law and evinced an executive order that ends U.S. preferential treatment toward Hong Kong. The move is aimed at punishing China for passing a new national security measure that infringes the way Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous region in the country, and some of its financial institutions, operate.
