President Joe Biden didn’t make any big changes to his standard stump speech on Tuesday, appearing before a large union audience just hours after announcing his 2024 White House bid.
Biden deployed many of the same lines – going after the ‘MAGA Republicans,’ including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and former President Donald Trump – and briefly choked up after making a reference to losing a family member from cancer.
His eldest son Beau Biden died of glioblastoma in 2015.
The president also falsely claimed that his ‘grandpop’ died two weeks before he was born at the same hospital – despite the senior Biden’s obituary saying that he passed away more than a year before the president’s birthdate and the hospitals were not the same.
Still, Biden picked the right crowd to make his first post-announcement appearance, earning several standing ovations and one raucous ‘four more years’ chant when the president teased his reelection run by saying, ‘It’s time to finish the job.’
President Joe Biden didn’t make any big changes to his standard stump speech on Tuesday, appearing before a large union audience just hours after announcing his 2024 White House bid
Biden was headlining the North America’s Building Trades Unions Conference at the Washington Hilton, where he’ll return Saturday for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
‘I’m so glad to see you guys, this feels like coming home,’ the president said at the top of his speech.
He didn’t expressly talk about his White House bid, but he knocked around the Republicans – earning them boos from the largely Democratic-leaning audience.
Biden mocked Trump for his many infrastructure weeks, which always seemed to coincide with a scandal.
‘Under my predecessor infrastructure became a punch line, under my watch infrastructure has become a decade [long] headline,’ the president said, prompting audience members to jump to their feet.
In front of the union audience he teased that ‘all construction materials used in federal infrastructure projects have to be made in America.’
‘That’s been the law since the 30s but no one had the nerve to insist on it,’ he added.
Still, Biden picked the right crowd to make his first post-announcement appearance, earning several standing ovations and one raucous ‘four more years’ chant when the president teased his reelection run by saying, ‘It’s time to finish the job’
Biden joked that real ‘left-wing Democratic papers, like the Wall Street Journal’ had written piece about the manufacturing boom under his watch, touting that ‘America is back in the factory business.’
The New York Times, the president said, was making manufacturing great again, bringing the U.S. ‘the kind of manufacturing surge that Trump had promised.’
‘He delivered!’ a female audience member yelled.
Biden again pushed that Congressional Republicans have told him behind closed doors that they’re for some of his policies.
‘Joe, we agree with you, but if I do this I’ll lose my primary,’ Biden said he was told.
‘Not a profile in couarge, but they’re acknowledging it.’
Biden slammed some Republican efforts to roll back the Inflation Reduction Act, with its healthcare provisions, which was passed with only Democratic votes last summer.
‘The new speaker of the House didn’t think it was necessary,’ Biden said.
‘Neither was he!’ shouted a male audience member.
Biden also took on McCarthy and the House GOP for pushing through a spending bill that would dramatically cut federal spending – an exchange for raising the debt ceiling.
Biden said cutting social programs for children, the elderly, healthcare for veterans, while giving tax breaks to big oil, big pharma and the wealthiest corporations, was the ‘same old trickle down dressed up in MAGA clothing,’ repeating an attack line he started using last week.
He noted that ‘even Donald Trump said I can’t imagine anyone ever thinking of using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge.’
‘Folks, America’s not a deadbeat nation,’ Biden said. ‘We pay our bills.’
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk