President Joe Biden appears to be growing desperate as he faces the genuine possibility that he will lose his bid for a second term in office in a rematch election against former President Donald Trump.
That desperation was evident during a pair of exceptionally angry dishonest campaign speeches on Sunday in which Biden rehashed old debunked falsehoods and unproven accusations against his bitter rival Trump, according to Newsweek.
While Biden launched numerous attacks on Trump based on misleading claims and outright lies during the two campaign speeches in Nevada, it was particularly noteworthy that he chose on both occasions to resurrect a hotly disputed and still-unconfirmed anonymously sourced report from several years ago that accused Trump of disparaging fallen U.S. military service members during a trip to France.
Early Sunday evening, during a campaign event in Henderson, Nevada, President Biden said of former President Trump, "The President, he said -- called servicemen buried in the cemetery in France -- when he was there, he wouldn’t go up to -- to deal with it. You know what he said?"
"I’m -- got to hold my Irish temper. I’m glad I wasn’t with him because I’m not sure what I’d have done," Biden continued. "He said they’re all a bunch of 'suckers' and 'losers.' My son was not a sucker, nor were any of yours. Who does this guy think he is talking about Americans like that?"
Just a couple of hours later during a campaign speech in Las Vegas, told a slightly different version of the same story, and said, "By the way, this is the guy who, when he was in France and he was -- they asked him to go to this -- a American cemetery in France from World War Two where Americans were buried."
"And you know what he said? He said those folks buried in that cemetery were 'suckers' and 'losers.' 'Suckers' and 'losers,' the guy said," Biden added. "No, I’m not kidding. By the way, that’s bey- -- I’m glad I wasn’t there. No, no, I’m serious. I shouldn’t say that. But I’m glad I wasn’t there. To call my son and your sons and daughters who gave their lives for this country 'suckers' and 'losers.' That’s how this guy thinks. Who the hell does he think he is?"
What President Biden was inartfully -- and incorrectly -- referring to in those attacks against former President Trump were unproven claims from anonymous sources in a September 2020 article from The Atlantic about supposed disparaging remarks he made about dead U.S. soldiers and Marines during a 2018 visit to France.
Trump was scheduled to attend a special ceremony at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery to honor the roughly 1,800 U.S. Marines and other service members buried there following the World War I battle of Belleau Wood, but was unable to attend due to extremely poor weather conditions that grounded his helicopter and made travel by motorcade unadvisable.
Per The Atlantic's unnamed sources, Trump was purported to have said to others, "Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers," and then later remarked again that the Marines and soldiers buried there were "suckers" for having been killed in the fierce WWI battle.
The Trump-hating media and Democrats like then-candidate Biden ran wild with the anonymous accusations at the time, which then-President Trump vehemently disputed -- as did more than a dozen members of his administration who were actually there for the 2018 event in France and issued statements on the record that firmly denied the unproven allegations, according to a "fact check" at the time from The Washington Post.
Some of those strong denials even came from former allies-turned-critics of Trump, such as former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who would most assuredly have further shared the accusations if he had anything that even slightly resembled such comments.
President Biden's two speeches in Nevada were chock-full of other grossly untrue or deceptively misleading claims against former President Trump beyond those unfounded allegations about his supposed disparaging remarks about fallen U.S. troops -- far too many to list here.
Biden's blatant dishonesty and repetition of unproven anonymously sourced accusations that stemmed from a highly biased "journalist" at a suspect left-leaning outlet could be evidence of his rapidly declining mental health and cognition, but it could also be evidence of his likely anxiety and fear over the fact that Trump has been leading him in the national 2024 polls since last fall.
