Donald Trump has speculated that Joe Biden is either lying or ‘mentally gone’ after the president on Tuesday night said his administration arrived to find no COVID-19 vaccines available.
Trump, who on Wednesday broke his silence to give a series of interviews marking the death of Rush Limbaugh, told Newsmax Biden made ‘a very dumb statement’ about the vaccines.
The former president teased a possible 2024 run, boasting about his ‘tremendous support’, and said he would not be returning to Twitter – the platform from which he was banned last month.
‘It’s become very boring,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to go back to Twitter.’
Donald Trump spoke to Newsmax host Greg Kelly on Wednesday night
Trump has been at Mar-a-Lago in Florida since leaving Washington DC on January 20
Trump, who on Wednesday broke his silence to give a series of interviews marking the death of Rush Limbaugh, told Newsmax Biden made ‘a very dumb statement’ about the vaccines. Pictured: Trump playing golf this morning at his golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida
The former president teased a possible 2024 run, boasting about his ‘tremendous support’, and said he would not be returning to Twitter – the platform from which he was banned last month. Pictured: Trump playing golf this morning at his golf course in West Balm Beach, Florida
Trump, 74, was on Wednesday highly critical of Biden’s remarks during a CNN town hall in Milwaukee the night before.
Biden, asked about combating COVID, told host Anderson Cooper: ‘It’s one thing to have the vaccine – which we didn’t have when we came into office – but a vaccinator: How do you get the vaccine into someone’s arm?’
His comments were immediately seized upon by critics, who pointed out that a vaccine had been available since before Christmas.
‘We were giving millions of shots, millions of doses,’ said Trump on Wednesday, speaking by phone to host Greg Kelly.
‘So he was either not telling the truth or he’s mentally gone. One or the other.
‘Joe Biden’s being killed on that thing. Even the haters said, well wait a minute, this vaccine was announced long before.’
Joe Biden on Tuesday night appeared at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee
Biden and Trump are pictured during a presidential debate on September 29 in Cleveland
Trump pointed out that Biden himself was vaccinated before his January 20 inauguration.
‘Long before January 20,’ said Trump.
‘He made the statement that we had no vaccine. Literally, quote, we had no vaccine. He is getting lit up on that one. Even the bad ones. Even the ones that aren’t exactly fans, they were saying that was a bad statement.
‘Maybe, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt – could he be joking? Because frankly that was a very dumb statement.’
Trump has been at Mar-a-Lago since his January 20 departure from Washington, and has seen his allies including lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell hit with massive law suits for falsely claiming that Dominion voting machines switched the votes from Trump to Biden.
The pair are facing a $1.3 billion defamation suit.
Earlier this month Fox News and three Fox anchors – Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro – were sued by another voting systems company, Smartmatic, for $2.7 billlion. Giuliani and Powell are also named in the suit.
The legal action has seen pro-Trump networks drastically curtail their claims of election rigging.
Dobbs’ show has been taken off the air, and, earlier this month, Newsmax anchor Bob Sellers stormed off the set in the middle of an interview with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell when Lindell started spouting the election conspiracy theories.
Dominion have said they intend to sue Lindell too.
Donald Trump is pictured on January 20. His interviews on Wednesday were pre-recorded
The former president is also no longer on Twitter, and claimed that the social media network was ‘boring’ without him.
He said the platforms could not cope with his popularity, claiming he had 89 million followers on Twitter ‘because they held it back’ and a further 39 million on the official POTUS account.
‘We had other sites where we had millions and millions of people,’ he said.
‘We were about as big as it gets. And likewise on Facebook. They all want that.
‘Part of the problem is mechanically they can’t handle it, it’s too many people. It’s bigger than they are by many times.’
Trump said that, since he had been forced from social media for inciting violence, it was ‘not the same.’
He said: ‘If you look at what’s going on with Twitter, I understand it’s become very boring and millions are leaving.
‘They are leaving it, because it’s not the same. And I can understand that.’
Trump said he was ‘negotiating with a number of people’ about potentially starting his own site, and said he had no plans to return to Twitter because the moderators were ‘harassing’ him for claiming the election was stolen.
‘We were being really harassed on Twitter,’ he said.
‘They were putting up all sorts of flags, I guess they call them. They were flagging almost anything I said. Everything I was saying was being flagged.
‘It’s disgraceful.
‘And yet you had other countries saying the worst things possible. And they don’t even talk about it.’
Trump also dangled the possibility of a 2024 run, saying he was confident of his ‘tremendous’ support.
Trump, seen leaving Washington DC on January 20, said he was contemplating running again
Asked by Kelly if he’s run, he said: ‘I won’t say yet. But we have tremendous support.’
Trump said that his poll numbers were ‘through the roof.’
He left the White House with the lowest job approval of his presidency at 29 per cent, according to Pew Research, and increasingly negative ratings for his post-election conduct.
The share of voters surveyed from January 8-12 who rated Trump’s conduct since the election as only fair or poor has risen from 68 per cent in November to 76 per cent.
Trump voters, in particular, have grown more critical of their candidate’s post-election conduct. The share of his supporters who describe his conduct as poor has doubled over the past two months, from 10 per cent to 20 per cent.
About two-thirds (68 per cent) said Trump should not continue to be a major national political figure for many years to come; just 29 per cent say he should remain a major figure in U.S. politics.
Trump, however, said he had become more popular since his impeachment in the House on January 13. He was acquitted by the Senate on Saturday.
‘I’m the only guy who gets impeached and my numbers go up,’ he said.
‘Figure that one out. Let’s say somebody gets impeached. Typically your numbers would go down, they would go down like a dead balloon. But the numbers are very good, they are very high. I think they are higher than they were before the election, and they were high at the election.’
Trump said his supporters ‘like the job.’
He said: ‘We did a great job. We lowered taxes, got rid of regulations. We rebuilt our military. Lowered taxes.
‘How about space force? Just space force alone would be a big achievement – first time in 74 years, a new branch of the U.S. military. All of the things we’ve done.
‘And the border. We built the wall. Mexico is all getting all ready to pay for the wall. We were going to charge them at the border. A small fee. Mexico would have paid for the wall. They were all set. They give us 28,000 troops. They policed them before they get there. The president of Mexico is a great gentleman, by the way. He put 28,000 troops on our border, at my request, and we didn’t pay for that. We kept the border beautiful.
‘Now you take a look at what is going on at the border, it’s a disgrace,’ he added.
‘It’s a disgrace. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to be pouring in.’