Iowa rallies become war of words
DAVENPORT, Iowa — President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly ripped into each other on Tuesday as unfit to lead the country as they both traveled to the battleground state of Iowa, giving voters a preview of what a general election matchup between the two men might look like.
In the most ferocious day of attacks in the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump resorted to taunts and namecalling from morning to night, saying Biden was “a loser,” “a sleepy guy” and “the weakest mentally,” and claiming that “people don’t respect him.” Biden took a different tack, laying out ways Trump was “an existential threat” to the country, its international standing and its values.
Biden, who leads in early polls for the Democratic presidential nomination, also brought up subjects he had previously avoided with reporters, such as Trump siding with the North Korean state media’s insults on Biden’s IQ.
“He embraces dictators like Kim Jong Un, who’s a damn murderer and a thug,” Biden said at his second event of the day in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. “The one thing they agree on: Joe Biden shouldn’t be president.”
The hostile exchanges, which went back and forth across multiple Iowa campaign stops, were the clearest evidence yet that the two men see political advantages in waging a battle against each other at this early stage of the race.
Biden has largely ignored his 22 Democratic rivals while building his campaign around the urgent need to oust Trump. Rather than get drawn into squabbles with more liberal candidates or lesser-known ones, he is trying to present himself as presidential material and the most electable Democrat against Trump — particularly in swing states like Iowa, where the president trounced Hillary Clinton in 2016 after Barack Obama carried the state in 2008 and 2012.
Trump, mindful of polling that shows him trailing Biden in several key states, has targeted him with ridicule lately far more than he has the other Democratic candidates.
While they have attacked each other from a distance, their appearances in the same state on Tuesday seemed primed to intensify the hostility. Biden wasted no time trying to frame the debate, releasing excerpts at 6 a.m. Tuesday from the remarks he had prepared to deliver at a speech in Davenport in the evening.
Throughout the day, Biden laced into Trump over a range of policy issues, such as pursuing an “erratic war on trade” and his approach to tariff negotiations, as farmers — including in this heavily agricultural state — have struggled.
But the sharpest part of Biden’s remarks in Davenport was his argument that, while the nation “can overcome four years of this presidency,” Trump would pose an existential threat to “the character of this nation” if he were reelected and served another term.
“In 2020, we not only have to repudiate Donald Trump’s policies and values — we have to clearly and fully reject, for our own safety’s sake, his view of the presidency,” Biden said. “Quote: ‘I have complete power.’ No you don’t, Donald Trump.”
“‘Only I can fix it.’ Fix yourself first,” Biden said as the crowd enthusiastically drowned him out.
The early excerpts from Biden’s remarks received prominent attention in the news media on Tuesday morning. Trump, as he departed the Oval Office, told reporters that he thought Biden was “a loser” and questioned his mental fitness.
After arriving in Council Bluffs, Trump hinted that he was waiting until his kickoff rally on June 18 in Orlando, Florida, for his official “political season” to begin. But he couldn’t help but strike at Biden in between touting the low unemployment rate and the boom in blue collar jobs. “He was someplace in Iowa today and he said my name so many times that people couldn’t stand it anymore,” Trump said. “No, don’t keep saying it. Sleepy guy.”
Later, Trump noted that America “would never be treated with respect” under Biden’s leadership, “because people don’t respect him.”
The attacks by Trump were, in one way, a boost for Biden after days of Democratic criticism over his shifting stances on federal funding for abortion. On Tuesday, there was wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the Trump-biden feud, not of abortion.