President Biden hit Donald Trump as a “sucker” and “loser” during CNN’s presidential debate Thursday, in reference to remarks the former president reportedly made about dead U.S. soldiers.
“I was recently in France for D-Day, and I spoke to all about those heroes that died. I went to the World War II cemetery — World War I cemetery he refused to go to,” Biden said during the debate, referring to Trump, who declined to visit the cemetery when he was president in 2018.
“He was standing with his four-star general, and he told me, he said, ‘I don’t want to go in there, because they’re a bunch of losers and suckers,’” Biden said. “My son was not a loser. He’s not a sucker. You’re the sucker. You’re the loser.”
Biden was referring to a story published in The Atlantic in September 2020 in which the former president canceled a trip to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 for reasons not due to the weather as Trump previously claimed.
“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” Trump said regarding the visit, according to the magazine. The magazine noted he also called dead marines “suckers.”
Trump has previously pushed back against that reporting, saying he didn’t made those remarks, though former White House chief of staff John Kelly did confirm Trump used the word “suckers.”
On the debate stage, Trump again denied he made those remarks and suggested it was fabricated.
“First of all, that was a made-up quote, ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.’ They made it up. It was in a third-rate magazine that’s failing, like many of these magazines,” Trump claimed.