Biden and Trump speak about the pandemic
Joe Biden and President Donald Trump spoke Monday about the coronavirus pandemic, a rare direct conversation between the incumbent president and his likely Democratic challenger, according to several people familiar with the conversation.
Biden, who has been harshly critical of Trump’s handling of the crisis, had offered to speak with Trump in recent days. The two connected after Biden’s team renewed efforts to reach out to the White House on Monday following a tweet by Trump that read, “What ever happened to that phone call he told the Fake News he wanted to make to me?”
One person familiar with the discussion described it as mutually respectful, saying it lasted between five and 10 minutes and focused solely on the virus.
The two camps had both suggested willingness to make the unusual call happen. Trump said last week that he would “love” to take Biden’s call, saying that he had “always found him to be a nice guy.”
“If he’d like to call I would absolutely take his call,” he had said. “OK? You can tell him.”
Their conversation comes as Biden has sought to find ways to communicate with voters virtually from his home in the Wilmington, Delaware, area, though he has often found himself overshadowed by the bully pulpit of the presidency.
In a brief virtual news conference with reporters last week, Biden said that if he spoke with Trump, “it won’t be, ‘I told you so, Mr. President.’ ” The intention, he said, would be to share his recommendations for combating the virus and to discuss his own experience dealing with other crises. The Ebola outbreak, for example, happened during the Obama administration.
“This is beyond politics right now,” Biden said. “We’re talking about a lot of people potentially dying. And we’re now leading the world in the number of cases. And we’ve got to act more swiftly, more rapidly. And, you know, we’ve been through this, in a slightly different way, in the past. And I hope they can learn some lessons from what we did right and maybe what we did wrong.”