Joe Biden Unleashed: Trump Is ‘Not Fit’ to Be Commander in Chief

In his second press conference of the week, ratcheting up his campaign since becoming his party’s nominee for president, Joe Biden angrily denounced Donald Trump for comments attributed to him in a now-viral article in The Atlantic, saying, if they were true, they were “disgusting.” Biden added that the article ”affirms what most of us believe to be true: that Donald Trump is not fit to be commander in chief.”

Referring to the article’s assertion that in 2018, while in Paris, Trump skipped a trip to a French cemetery where U.S. soldiers killed in WWI had been buried, because it was raining that day, and saying that people who were killed in battle were “losers” and “suckers,” Biden referred to his own late son, Beau, who had served in Iraq, saying the younger Biden “wasn’t a ”sucker” and that “the servicemen and women he served with, particularly those who did not come home, were not ‘losers.’”

Citing critical statements that Trump had made in the past about military figures, particularly John McCain, a former POW – “I like people who weren’t captured” – Biden said, “President Trump has demonstrated he has no sense of service, no loyalty to any cause other than himself.”

“Who the heck does he think he is?” Biden added of Trump, speaking at a gymnasium near his home in Wilmington, Del. “I’m always cautioned not to lose my temper. This is as close as I think I’ve come in this campaign. It’s just a marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree.” Biden demanded that the president “humbly apologize” for his comments.

Trump has denied making those statements. In brief comments to reporters after returning from a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Thursday night, he called The Atlantic “a terrible magazine” and said that its story was fiction. “I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes,” he said. “There is nobody that respects them more. So, I just think it’s a horrible, horrible thing.” On Friday, he called it “a totally fake story.”

The article was attributed to four anonymous sources, but other news organizations, including The Washington Post, have said that the have confirmed that the president made those comments attributed to him or similar ones in the past.

Biden also forcefully criticized the president for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, saying “It didn’t have to be this bad, if the president just did his job.” He added: “You cannot have an economic recovery when a thousand Americans a day are dying. It’s almost like he doesn’t care, because it doesn’t effect him. It doesn’t effect him or his class of friends.”

And when asked what he thought of the president for mocking him for wearing a mask, Biden said, “It’s hard to respond to something so idiotic.”