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Biden, Trump Go on Attack With Ballot Question Clouding Race
(Bloomberg) -- Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden squared off Friday in dueling speeches as the US Supreme Court announced it would hear a case that strikes at the core of America’s presidential election process.
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Trump mocked and vilified Biden from the podium in Iowa Friday, where in a little more than a week the Republican Party will hold its first contest in the 2024 race.
The speech began moments after the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether Colorado can bar Trump from the presidential ballot, taking up a landmark constitutional and political clash stemming from his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
“The Supreme Court is taking the case from Colorado,” Trump said, to cheers from the audience. “The Republican judges want to go out of their way to be fair,” he added, pointing out that he appointed three justices to the court.
Read More: Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Trump Colorado Ballot Appeal
Maine has also ruled Trump ineligible to run on the primary because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, and he is suing the secretary of state there.
Earlier in the day from swing-state Pennsylvania, Biden cast Trump as a threat to democracy at a campaign event near Valley Forge, a symbolic Revolutionary War site where General George Washington commanded troops.
Both men’s comments come on the eve of the third anniversary the assault on the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters bent on overturning his election loss to Biden.
“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him. Not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy,” Biden said in his Pennsylvania address. “Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.”
Trump lashed back from a podium in Sioux Center, Iowa, on Friday evening. “That’s why Crooked Joe is staging his pathetic fear-mongering campaign event in Pennsylvania today,” he said. “They’ve weaponized government. He’s saying I’m a threat to democracy.”
Trump also belittled his chief Republican opponents, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, a United Nations ambassador in the Trump administration.
The fiery speech on Friday encapsulates Trump’s strategy of running as a de facto incumbent, already pivoting toward a rematch with Biden. Yet he first must quell any momentum from DeSantis and Haley, in Iowa on Jan. 15 and other early early voting states in the coming weeks.
Trump is the clear frontrunner in Iowa and nationally, according to polls. Trump has poured resources into early voting states in hopes of quickly delivering a knockout blow to Haley and DeSantis.
Trump’s campaign, in a statement, said it was confident that “the fair-minded Supreme Court will unanimously affirm the civil rights of President Trump, and the voting rights of all Americans in a ruling that will squash all of the remaining ballot challenge hoaxes once and for all.”
The legal drama was on the mind of Trump supporters in Iowa. Jennifer Dekkers of Sioux Center said she didn’t believe the efforts to keep Trump off the ballot were constitutional.
“I don’t understand why they think they can do this to him at this time but I also think some of the things that they do that are so stupid just makes it show just really how scared they are of him, of what he actually is doing.” she said.
Gayla Mortenson, who lives on a farm near Boyden, Iowa, said she was relieved by the Supreme Court’s decision: “People should have their choice as to who they want to vote for as a candidate.”
(Updates with voter comment, in final two paragraphs.)
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