Joe Biden: Wrong for So Long

Biden has spent nearly a half a century in Washington as a career politician, he’s proved over and over he’s ill-equipped to handle the problems facing our nation

The Trump administration has been taking bold actions to stem the coronavirus, reignite our economy and provide racial equality, while Joe Biden has been playing politics from his basement.

Tonight, the Democrats will address what they've defined as our nation’s three largest crises – the pandemic, the economy and racial injustice. It’s funny – after spending nearly a half a century in Washington, Biden is now campaigning to fix the problems he helped create in office. America is strong under President Trump’s leadership. Biden is weak.

CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE:

Biden continues to undermine the public confidence in the Trump Administration’s historic response to the coronavirus, confusing basic facts and plagiarizing President Trump’s already implemented strategy. President Trump’s leadership has led to a stockpile of new ventilators, a national testing strategy, record-setting development of a vaccine, and a secured supply chain.

Democrat governors praised the Trump Administration’s coronavirus response, with Gov. Andrew Cuomo calling it a “phenomenal accomplishment.” Meanwhile, Biden's record is nothing to brag about:

Swine-Flu Fail

• Using past as predicate, during the H1N1 Swine Flu, the Biden-Obama administration vaccine shortages were widespread. Slate reported the problem was both “predictable and largely avoidable.”
• Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain admitted last year that the Biden-Obama efforts to secure a vaccine and fight the H1N1 virus were a total disaster. "We did every possible thing wrong. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right,” he said. “It just had to do with luck. It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history."
• Biden failed to replenish America’s stockpile of N95 masks after the Swine Flu pandemic. As Reuters reported months ago, the Trump Administration has already launched initiatives to bring supply chains back to the United States, with the coronavirus pandemic “turbocharging” those efforts.
• During the Biden-Obama Swine-Flu epidemic their administration suddenly told states to shut down their testing, without providing much in the way of explanation.
  • "In late July, the CDC abruptly advised states to stop testing for H1N1 flu, and stopped counting individual cases," CBS News reported in 2009. "The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was: why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there's an epidemic?"

Biden's Lies and Mistruths

• Biden falsely claimed he called for the use of the Defense Production Act “before anybody.”  Biden only called for use of the DPA in March, just minutes after President Trump said he would invoke it. President Trump has used the FDA and the Defense Production Act to expand coronavirus testing technologies and capacity.
• Biden has falsely suggested President Trump has cut funding from the CDC and NIH. Funding has gone up under President Trump for both the CDC and NIH.
• Kamala Harris has incorrectly called Ebola our last national pandemic, using it to highlight Biden's supposed leadership instead of the Swine Flu. It was in fact classified as an outbreak and not a pandemic, according to the World Health Organization.
• Despite Democrats’ fear-mongering during our national crisis, several advanced nations have suffered more fatalities per million population than the U.S.: Belgium, the U.K., Spain, Italy, Sweden.
• Biden has called for a nationwide mask mandate, however, there is no such thing as a federal mask wearing mandate.

China Miscalculation (Again)

• President Trump took decisive action to restrict travel with China despite Joe Biden’s accusations of “hysterical xenophobia.” Weeks later Biden agreed with President Trump that the travel restrictions saved lives.

Trump's Coronavirus Successes:

• The United States leads the world in coronavirus testing, with more than 33 million tests completed and nearly half a million new tests being conducted per day.
• President Trump completely overhauled the old and outdated testing system and replaced it with an innovative new testing strategy to meet the country’s needs.
• The United States is testing and tracking asymptomatic cases of coronavirus, which allows officials to identify and stop local outbreaks faster than other countries.
• President Trump launched Operation Warp Speed to guarantee the American people are first in line for a safe, effective coronavirus vaccine – at no cost – as soon as one is developed.
  • The U.S. now has a portfolio of vaccines that will help the U.S. meet its goal of delivering 300 million doses of a safe, effective, and authorized vaccine by the end of the year.

THE ECONOMY:

Biden’s trying to convince Americans that he’s the right choice to handle America’s economic recovery after the coronavirus. But here’s the problem: as Vice President, Biden oversaw the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression and eight years of stagnant wage growth. Before he was VP, Biden spent decades voting for and defending terrible trade deals while he cozied up to China and insisted they were not an economic threat.

Despite his record of failure, Biden is pledging to repeat his mistakes, doubling down on his failed, old, liberal ideas of raising taxes, more red tape, smothering American-made energy and sacrificing jobs. President Trump is the only candidate who knows how to fire up our country’s economic engine with pro-worker policies that put America first.

• Under President Trump, July’s job report of 1.8 million jobs added is more than three times bigger than the best month Biden ever delivered.
• During the global pandemic, President Trump’s Paycheck Protection Program preserved 51 million jobs, most of them at small businesses. Biden has falsely claimed the PPP was not protecting jobs.
• Biden oversaw the 2009 stimulus package, which failed to deliver the “shovel ready jobs” he promised, and was plagued by taxpayer waste, fraud and abuse. Remember the $535 million Solyndra disaster?
• President Trump kept his promise to renegotiate NAFTA. He replaced it with the USMCA, a huge win for American workers who bore the brunt of Biden’s bad judgment.
  • Biden, who once admitted he is not “an expert on international trade matters,” and voted for NAFTA, then spent years defending it while 850,000 Americans lost their jobs due to the bad trade deal. 
• President Trump cut taxes for middle-class Americans and successfully encouraged American companies to bring $1 trillion in wealth back to the United States. Biden has said “the first thing” he would do is end President Trump’s middle-class tax cuts – and his plan would ultimately raise taxes by a whopping $4 trillion, resulting in a tax hike for 82 percent of Americans.
• President Trump successfully negotiated a Phase One trade deal with China. Biden said he would stop President Trump’s efforts to hold China accountable for its unfair trade practices, allowing Beijing to rip off our country and hurt American workers without any consequences.
• President Trump unleashed our energy independence. Biden wants to strangle it with The Green New Deal. Biden’s newly unveiled plan to eliminate oil, gas, and coal from our electric grid would cost $4.5 trillion and destroy 10.3 million jobs.
• President Trump’s deregulatory actions are expected to increase household income annually by $3,100. At a time when workers were struggling, the Biden-Obama  Administration flooded businesses with regulations, at a cost of roughly $750 billion.
• Biden has admitted himself, the economic policies he enacted as Vice President were a disaster for hardworking Americans:
  • “The middle class has been buried the last four years,” Biden said in 2012.
  • “The American people right now, are, many of them are in real trouble. An even larger percentage have stagnant wages,” Biden said in 2011.
  • Biden said that Americans had a “right to be mad” and expressed concerns that he and President Obama could lose their re-election in 2012 over the economy.
  • In 2012, Biden referred to the economy as a “depression,” admitted that wages were stagnant, and said it was“hard” for those in the middle class
  • “A lot of people were left behind,” Biden told The New York Times in 2019. “In areas where people were hard hit, I don’t think we paid enough attention to their plight.” 

Biden has been so wrong for so long. After 47 years of failure, he’s offering the same failed, old, liberal ideas.

President Trump is the only candidate who knows how to fire up our country’s economic engine with pro-worker policies that put America first.

RACIAL INJUSTICE:

With Biden’s record of praising segregationists and pushing laws that mass incarcerated Black Americans, his record with African Americans is abysmal. Biden worked with segregationist Strom Thurmond to pass laws incarcerating Black Americans for crack cocaine possession; he voted to protect the tax-exempt status of segregated schools; he praised the civility of segregationists (then refused to apologize for it when confronted by Black Democrats like Cory Booker); and he authored the 1994 crime bill that made him the “architect of mass incarceration. ”

President Trump is undoing the damage Biden caused and delivering results on criminal justice reform, safe policing, and real economic opportunities for Black Americans, while Biden is struggling to explain four decades of betrayal, calamity and failure.

• Biden voted for bills which “Experts Agree Added Millions Of People To America’s Prisons.” Meanwhile, under President Trump’s leadership, the FIRST STEP Act was signed into law to help Americans newly released from prison to successfully integrate back into society.
  • More than 3,000 inmates have been released and another roughly 1,700 people convicted of crack cocaine offenses have seen their sentences reduced thanks to the First Step Act.
• To lift up underserved communities across the nation, President Trump’s tax cuts created nearly 9,000 opportunity zones. Joe Biden said the first thing he’d do in office is repeal this tax relief.
• For the first time ever, President Trump’s FUTURE Act, made permanent $255 million in annual STEM funding for minority-serving colleges, including roughly $85 million specifically allocated to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
• Instead of giving parents the opportunity to send their children to a better school, Biden wants to end school choice as we know it, saying the whole notion of charter schools will be “gone” under his administration.
• Before the coronavirus hit, President Trump had built the “best African American job market on record.” Black wages were finally growing after years of stagnation on Biden’s watch, and Black poverty and unemployment hit record lows while Black business owners were “feeling the boom.”
• Biden’s opposition to reopening the economy is hurting black-owned businesses. There has been a 41 percent decline among Black-owned businesses since the lockdowns began, yet some Democrat-run states are taking directions from Biden and keeping their lockdowns in place. For those residents, the recovery will be “especially painful.”
• Joe Biden loves to traffic in fear and division, continuing to push the Charlottesville hoax, to which CNN’s Jake Tapper has said, President Trump did not call neo-Nazis or white supremacists “very fine people.”
• Meanwhile, Biden happily accepted the endorsement of Rep. James Clyburn, a proud supporter and strong defender of racist anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, who said Hitler was “a very great man.”
• At the end of Biden’s 44 years in office, 69 percent of Americans – an all-time high – said that race relations were mostly bad.

Biden had time to deliver on racial justice while serving in office. Instead, all he’s done is use racial tension to divide people for political gain. Biden is too weak to change anything President Trump is right: Retiring Joe Biden in November is the first step towards achieving racial justice, reigniting our economy and defeating the coronavirus.