President Trump on Wednesday bashed media coverage of a speech from former Vice President Joe Biden as he flew from Dayton, Ohio, to El Paso, Texas, between meetings with first responders and survivors of the weekend’s mass shootings.
“Watching Sleepy Joe Biden making a speech. Sooo Boring!” Trump tweeted from aboard Air Force One. “The LameStream Media will die in the ratings and clicks with this guy. It will be over for them, not to mention the fact that our Country will do poorly with him. It will be one big crash, but at least China will be happy!”
Trump’s tweet came as all three major cable networks carried Biden’s speech in which the presidential candidate decried the president’s lack of moral leadership and accused him of fanning “the flames of white supremacy.”
“Trump offers no moral leadership, seems to have no interest in unifying this nation. No evidence that the presidency has awakened his conscience in the least,” Biden said in Burlington, Iowa. “Indeed, we have a president with a toxic tongue who has publicly and unapologetically embraced a political strategy of hate, racism and division.”{mosads}
The president often fixates on Biden, who is considered the front-runner in the Democratic primary field and leads Trump in multiple polls of a hypothetical 2020 match-up.
Biden delivered Wednesday’s speech as Trump flew to El Paso from Dayton, where a gunman killed nine people in a shooting on Sunday. The president met with first responders and victims’ families at a hospital in Dayton, but offered no public remarks.
The suspected shooter in El Paso, who left 22 people dead, allegedly published a manifesto that warned of a Latino “invasion,” and used other language similar to Trump’s rhetoric on immigration.
In the wake of the shooting, Democrats have asserted that Trump’s past comments — describing the influx of migrants as an “invasion” and broadly labeling immigrants as “criminals” — contributed to the weekend’s violence.
Trump and his allies have pushed back against those allegations, accusing his opponents of politicizing the tragedy.
“My critics are political people,” he said before leaving for Dayton. “They’re trying to make points. In many cases, they’re running for president and they’re very low in the polls.”
Updated at 3:25 p.m.