The Republican frontrunner has mocked his opponent for not being able “to string two sentences together”
Donald Trump speaks at the National Rifle Association’s Presidential Forum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, February 9, 2024 © AP / Matt Rourke
Former US President Donald Trump has mocked President Joe Biden’s apparent cognitive decline, telling supporters that the 82-year-old Democrat doesn’t “know he’s alive.” Government prosecutor Robert Hur backed up Trump’s assessment earlier this week, declaring Biden too senile to stand trial.
Speaking at a National Rifle Association (NRA) expo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Friday, Trump condemned the US Justice Department for prosecuting him over his alleged mishandling of classified documents, while declining to charge Biden for the same offense.
“This is nothing more than selective persecution of Biden’s political opponent, me,” Trump asserted. “And I don’t think it’s Biden [who is behind the prosecution], because I don’t think he knows he’s alive,” he continued.
Trump is currently the presumptive Republican candidate to challenge Biden in this November’s presidential election. While he regularly mocks Biden’s mental faculties – remarking earlier this week that the president ‘can’t string two sentences together,” Trump’s attacks on Biden got an unexpected endorsement on Thursday from Special Counsel Robert Hur.
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Hur, who was investigating Biden’s allegedly improper handling of classified documents, concluded in a report that the president “willfully retained and disclosed” these documents. However, Hur recommended that Biden not be charged, as he came across to investigators as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” and it would be difficult to convince a jury that he committed “a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
In interviews with Hur’s office, Biden “did not remember when he was vice president,” and “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” the report stated.
Biden angrily denied the report’s claims, telling reporters later on Thursday that his “memory is fine.” However, in the same briefing, Biden falsely described Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the leader of Mexico.
Hur’s findings were released in the same week that Biden misremembered conversations he had with the leaders of France and Germany shortly after he took office in January 2021. He told supporters on Sunday that he had met with France’s Francois Mitterand, who actually died in 1996, and on Wednesday, he claimed to have spoken with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died four years earlier.
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Trump is currently leading Biden in almost all recent polls, by a margin of between one and seven points. An NBC poll released on Tuesday showed that 76% of US voters, including over half of Democrats, have concerns about whether Biden is mentally and physically fit enough for a second term as president.
