Joe serves up aged ribs to Don
Gridiron roast for foe
President Biden used his appearance at the Gridiron Club dinner on Saturday evening to rib former President Donald Trump and try to turn the tables on the age-old question haunting his reelection.
“One candidate is too old, mentally unfit to be president. The other’s me,” Biden, 81, quipped during his roughly 10minute speech at the white-tie media event.
The jabs come as Biden and his campaign have sought to put more of a spotlight on Trump’s verbal flubs and flagrant mishaps.
Earlier in the week, both Trump, 77, and Biden locked down enough delegates to clinch their respective parties’ nominations to be standard bearer for president.
A melange of polling has pegged widespread voter unease about Biden’s age. Last month, for example, an ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 86% of voters feel he is too old for another turn.
Earlier this month, he delivered a feisty and combative State of the Union address that his allies claim belied narratives about infirmity.
“Even the press has to admit, I crushed it,” Biden said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “The expectations were so low, I just had to show up and remember who the president is.”
Every year the Gridiron Club, an organization of journalists mostly based in DC, holds a dinner that presidents are invited to attend. It is usually a jovial affair with comedic sketches.
Almost every president has attended at least one of those events since the club’s formation in 1885.
This was the first time in his presidency that Biden addressed the annual bacchanalia.
Trump was far from the only target of Biden’s mockery during the dinner.
“The Republicans would rather fail at impeachment than succeed at anything else,” Biden chided at one point.
“Republicans were going to do a skit tonight,” Biden went on, according to the Journal. “But they couldn’t get a speaker.”
At one point, he skewered Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, taking aim at his height.
“We’re committed to helping the little guy,” Biden jabbed, according to the Daily Mail, “Ron DeSantis, but he won’t take our calls.”
Other notable attendees included Vice President Kamala Harris, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, Taoiseach of Ireland Leo Varadkar, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and TikTok CEO Shou Chew.
It wasn’t all fun and jokes during the dinner.
Biden also took a serious tone at points and warned about the stakes of the Nov. 5 presidential election.
“Look, I wish these were jokes, but they’re not,” Biden stressed.
“We live in an unprecedented moment of democracy — an unprecedented moment in history. Democracy and freedom are literally under attack. Putin’s on the march in Europe. My predecessor bows down to him and says, ‘Do whatever the hell you want,’ ” Biden warned.
He rattled off a litany of concerns such as the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot as well as efforts to thwart the 2020 election, which he described as the “greatest threat to our democracy since the American Civil War.”
The president ominously described “a poison coursing through the veins of our democracy.”