Former Vice President and media darling Joe Biden has been making the rounds this week promoting his new book about his late son, who passed away in 2015. Unfortunately he is also using the book tour as an opportunity to bash President Trump. On CBS’s The Late Show Monday night, Biden trashed Trump voters' “phony nationalism” claiming they were “undermining the essence of the Bill of Rights.” He also hoped that the election of Trump would go down as the “single exception in American history,” while briefly touting how much greater a president Hillary Clinton would’ve been.
After introducing Biden as “Mr. Vice President,” host Stephen Colbert and Biden shook hands and Biden pretended to leave the stage. “Now would be a good time to leave,” he quipped, apparently wanting to relive his days as the sitting VP. “Donald Trump is the President of the United States, spoiler alert,” Colbert joked.
Getting right to the point, he asked Biden if a year was more than enough time to give Trump “a fair shot:”
“Last time you were here was in December after President Trump was President-Elect and before he had been inaugurated and you said at the time, ‘We're going to give this guy an even shot, we're going to give him a clear shot to do the job.’ Have we given him enough of a shot at this point?” Colbert asked.
Biden chuckled before turning serious, saying that Trump’s comments about what happened in Charlottesville took him over the edge, and he couldn’t remain silent any longer. “I thought silence would be complicity. I mean for real. So I wrote an article for The Atlantic talking about, we’re in a battle for the soul of the country,” he stated. He slammed Trump for allegedly not having “outright flat condemnation” of what happened.
“I thought the silence was deafening and then when the comparison was made to those who were protesting, I found it reprehensible...the inability to condemn hate,” he criticized.
Clearly Biden felt right at home being invited to bash President Trump on the notoriously anti-Trump, anti-conservative host’s show. Colbert continued letting that willing attitude play right into his hands, asking, if Trump had changed the presidency forever:
One of the things that many people said when President Trump was elected, that we have to hold on to certain standards and we cannot normalize the behavior that got President Trump elected, but, on another level, whoever is the president, is, you know, de facto presidential. What do you think has changed about the presidency with him being president? How will this influence the future of presidencies?
Without hesitation, Biden responded:
“I think it will, God willing, will go down as the single exception in American history,” he said, as the audience loudly cheered. He continued:
I really mean it. Look, I think that a lot of the folks in the audience, my guess is, when the president was elected and the people he gathered around him, the political people he gathered around him came into play, you kind of thought it was, well, maybe it's amusing or a little bit, you know, embarrassing sometimes, but it wasn't -- it didn't go to the heart of who we were. But I’ll lay you eight to five -- and I'm speaking to a large crowd of Republican audience out in Thousand Oaks, California and I said how many of you are now worried about the stability of the Republic? How many of you are now worried about this new phony nationalism, us against them? How many of you are worried about this populism that is designed to essentially undermine the essence of the Bill of Rights, which is there are certain inalienable rights that, nobody no matter what the majority is, they cannot overrule. [applause]
I mean, I just think there's an attack on the system and I think people are worried and, by the way, and it goes beyond President Trump, in my view.
Biden stumbled, trying to gather his thoughts before reflecting on how great a presidency we would have, if Hillary Clinton had won:
I just think it's a -- look, but for 74,500 votes or thereabouts, we wouldn't be having this conversation, we would have a good president. We would have a president who understands the role of the presidency. She would have been somebody who would, in fact, you know, weaved that fabric.
Biden, whom the media has always characterized as well-mannered and above the fray, has taken every opportunity given to him this week to lay into Trump and continue playing politics outside of office.
Even when he was pushed by Megyn Kelly, of all people, on NBC’s Today show yesterday to apologize for comments he made while in office that crassly attacked Republicans, Biden refused to do it, even justifying the nasty comments as “different” than what Trump says.
But even when he was in office, the media largely ignored his numerous gaffes and offensive rhetoric against Republicans, such as when he said that Republicans were trying to put black people “back in chains.”
