It has been noted that President Joe Biden leaned hard into calling former President Donald Trump a “loser” in a new interview that seems designed to get under Trump’s skin via Mediaite.
President Biden has been escalating his attacks on Trump for months, and according to reports, there’s one attack that gets to him: being reminded of Biden’s victory in 2020 by being called a loser.
In a new profile by The New Yorker magazine’s Evan Osnos, the author evoked Biden’s first on-camera campaign speech, in which he went after Trump with attacks he workshopped at off-camera fundraisers for months:
Biden stepped onstage to the audience’s chant of “Four more years!” But little of what followed bore much resemblance to a typical campaign speech. There was no ingratiation, no name-check for the local pols. He barely bothered with the requisite list of first-term achievements. “The topic of my speech today is deadly serious,” he began, “and I think it needs to be made at the outset of this campaign.” He talked of the sacrifices memorialized at Valley Forge. “America made a vow—never again would we bow down to a king,” he said. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time.” He turned to the memory of January 6th and ticked through the horrors of that day—the wooden gallows, the chants of “Where’s Nancy?” Over and over, he named Trump—more than forty times in all. “Trump lost sixty court cases—sixty,” Biden said. “The legal path just took him back to the truth: that I won the election, and he was a loser.” The crowd erupted in chuckling applause.
The president hit that “loser” note while speaking to Osnos in the Oval Office, and in a chilling context similar to that of his speech but different in one key respect — looking forward instead of back:
One of the few points of certainty is a chilling one. Half the respondents to a CBS poll in January said they believed that the losing side of the coming election will resort to violence. Biden has an uneasy relationship to such knowledge. He is convinced that Americans will reject the Trumpist view of politics. “How can we, as a democracy, elect anyone President who says violence is appropriate?” he asked me. And he thinks that the press has failed to take full stock of Trump’s menace. “It’s like you’ve all become numbed by it.”
But he must also prepare for the prospect that this race will get very ugly. When I asked whether he thinks that Trump will concede if he loses in 2024, Biden said no. “Losers who are losers are never graceful,” he said. “I just think that he’ll do anything to try to win. If—and when—I win, I think he’ll contest it. No matter what the result is.”
