Donald Trump cries fraud as he faces a harder campaign without Joe Biden to run against
With the stroke of Joe Biden’s pen, the former president and the Republican Party have lost their underlying political case for Donald Trump’s bid to take back the White House.
Donald Trump has accused the Democratic Party of fraud as Republicans demanded Joe Biden resign immediately as President following his announcement that he would stand aside from his bid to seek the party’s nomination for president.
At the stroke of Joe Biden’s pen, the former president and the Republican Party have lost their underlying political case for Mr Trump’s re-election, which was built in large part about Mr Biden’s incompetence, decline and the set of policies he personally advocated as President.
“Now we have to start all over again. Shouldn’t the Republican Party be reimbursed for fraud in that everybody around Joe, including his doctors and the Fake News Media, knew he was not capable of running for, or being, President?” Mr Trump said on social media.
The former president on Sunday (Monday AEST) told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins he thought Kamala Harris would be “easier to beat” after Mr Biden announced he wouldn’t seek re-election, but punters don’t believe that.
Ms Harris’s chances of being elected in November shot up to 30 per cent on Sunday, around where Mr Biden’s have been for a year, before she has even nominated as the Democratic Party’s choice, as seems likely at this stage.
“He was not fit to serve from the very beginning, but the people around him lied to America about his Complete and Total Mental, Physical, and Cognitive Demise. Whoever the Left puts up now will just be more of the same,” Mr Trump fumed.
Republican house Speaker Mike Johnson called for Mr Biden to stand down immediately, foreshadowing a likely new political line of attack for a party that until today thought it had the November election in the bag, as his congressional colleagues demanded
“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President. He must resign the office immediately,” Mr Johnson he said in a statement on social media. “November 5 cannot arrive soon enough.”
Nancy Mace, among a handful of Republican congressmen who spoke at last week’s Republican convention in Milwaukee, called on the Harris and Biden cabinet to remove Mr Biden using the 25th amendment of the constitution.
“If Joe Biden does not have the cognitive ability to seek re-election, he does not have the cognitive ability to serve the remainder of his term. Tomorrow I will introduce a resolution calling on Kamala Harris to invoke the 25th amendment and assume the duties of acting president.
The Trump campaign team fired off a fundraising email immediately after the President’s announcement, which made no mention of Harris.
“The WASHINGTON ESTABLISHMENT, the Hate-America Media, and the corrupt DEEP STATE did everything they could to protect Biden, but YOUR SUPPORT just knocked him out of the race!” the email said.
Other Republicans turned on Ms Harris’s policy record, such as senator JD Vance, Mr Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, who slammed Mr Biden as “the worst president in my lifetime and Kamala Harris has been right with him every step of the way.
“Over the last four years she co-signed Biden’s open border and green scam policies that drove up the cost of housing and groceries. She owns all of these failures, and she lied for nearly four years about Biden’s mental capacity – saddling the nation with a president who can’t do the job,” he said on social media.
A Trump-aligned super pac accused Ms Harris of “covering up” the President’s decline in an advertisement released within minutes of his statement, seeking to tie her to all of Mr Biden’s policies, especially the surge in unauthorised immigration across the southern border. “Kamala was in on it. She covered up Joe’s obvious mental decline. Kamala knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it. Look what she got done: a border invasion, runaway inflation, the American Dream dead,” the voiceover said, alongside imagines of the President falling upstairs.
The Vice-President’s past policy record and public statements as former California attorney-general and US senator came under immediate scrutiny as Republicans sought to cast her as an even more politically extreme leftist than Mr Biden.
“As California’s attorney-general, I know what a crime looks like. Let me tell you an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal,” Ms Harris said in 2017 in a social media post seized on by ex-Trump adviser Stephen Miller.
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