Sarah Sanders faces backlash after tweet mocking Joe Biden over stutter
Sarah Sanders, Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary, faced a backlash for mocking Joe Biden after he appeared to reference his lifelong struggle with a stutter during Thursday’s Democratic debate.
Toward the end of the debate, Biden spoke about the people he meets while campaigning, who ask him for help. “My wife and I have a call list of somewhere between 20 and 100 people,” he said. “I give them my personal phone number.”
Biden referenced a “little kid” who approached him and said, “I can’t talk, what do I do?” In describing the exchange, Biden appeared to impersonate the child’s stutter, which many read as a reference to his own experience. In a recent interview with the Atlantic, the former vice-president and 2020 frontrunner recalled his boyhood efforts to overcome his speech impediment.
Sanders issued a tweet after the debate which appeared to make fun of Biden’s speech pattern, which she later deleted.
Responding to Sanders, Biden tweeted: “I’ve worked my whole life to overcome a stutter. And it’s my great honor to mentor kids who have experienced the same. It’s called empathy.”
In response to swift criticism online, Sanders tweeted that she was “not trying to make fun of anyone with a speech impediment. Simply pointing out I can’t follow much of anything Biden is talking about.”
After deleting the tweet she issued a further apology, saying: “I actually didn’t know that about you and that is commendable. I apologize and should have made my point respectfully.”
In the lead-up to the 2016 elections, Sanders’ former boss, the then candidate Trump, came under fire for imitating and mocking a journalist with a congenital joint condition.In the Atlantic article, Biden recalled how being mocked by a teacher filled him with “anger, rage, humiliation”. Since then, he said, he had learned that the stutter “can’t define who you are”.