Biden mocks ‘great real estate’ developer Trump who ‘didn’t build a damn thing’ at Labor Day rally in Pa.
President Biden on Monday mocked former commander-in-chief Donald Trump as a “great real estate” developer who “didn’t build a damn thing.”
Biden ripped Trump — the head of a New York City real estate dynasty and architect of the country’s controversial border wall with Mexico — while touting himself as the US’s infrastructure king.
“Guess what? The great real estate builder, the last guy here, he didn’t build a damn thing,” the 80-year-old president said during a Labor Day rally in swing state Pennsylvania.
“Under my predecessor, ‘Infrastructure Week’ became a punch line,” Biden said, referring to the dayslong Trump initiative in which his administration touted its national development plans.
“On my watch, infrastructure means a decade, and it’s a headline,” the president said, adding that $10 billion was committed to Pennsylvania so far from the federal government’s 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.
Trump, 77, is seeking a rematch against Biden in next year’s election after narrow swing-state defeats in 2020.
The former president exported US jobs to China during his tenure, Biden claimed Monday — even though Trump made opposing offshoring, tariffing Chinese goods and “decoupling” from China major parts of his economic agenda.
“When the last guy was here, you were shipping jobs to China. Now we’re bringing jobs home from China,” Biden claimed. “When the last guy was here, your pensions were at risk. We helped save millions of pensions with your help.”
Biden, previewing a likely campaign-trail attack, added, “When the last guy was here, he looked at the world from Park Avenue.
“I look at it from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I look at it from Claymont, Delaware. Not a joke.”
As Biden continued to draw contrasts with Trump, who partly cultivated his brand as a reality-TV billionaire, the president then claimed he was called “Middle-Class Joe” as an insult.
“Folks, all my time in public office, I’ve been referred to as ‘Middle-Class Joe.’ I guess they thought that was, uh, somehow not very complimentary,” he said.
“Well, guess what, that’s who I am. And it doesn’t mean you’re not sophisticated because you’re middle-class, it means you work like hell. And you know what, your family has to work like hell to be able to make it,” said Biden — who has long used the moniker “Middle-Class Joe” as a self-styled nickname, though he moved into a 10,000-square-foot former DuPont family mansion in 1974 one year after joining the Senate.
The 2024 GOP presidential campaign is expected to focus heavily on the Biden family’s receipt of millions of dollars from shady business partners in countries such as China, Russia and Ukraine during Joe Biden’s vice presidency.
