WASHINGTON — President Biden on Monday joked about trying to “cut” former President Donald Trump from November’s election.
The 81-year-old Democratc president seemed to ad-lib his punchline at a White House Rose Garden celebration of Cinco de Mayo after saying his Republican foe “wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.
“He says there’s a lot we can do in terms of cutting,” Biden said, referring to a recent interview given by Trump, 77.
“I’ve got one really serious idea of how to cut,” Biden added, pausing and chuckling to himself before adding “a candidate.”
Biden made the joke even though Trump has been accusing him on a nearly daily basis of orchestrating his four pending criminal prosecutions, including his ongoing hush money trial in New York City for allegedly falsifying business records in 2016.
“This is [Democratic Manhattan District Attorney] Alvin Bragg doing it for political reasons for Biden,” Trump told journalists at the courthouse Monday morning. “This is a Biden trial. He’s a crooked president.”
Trump has pointed out that Matthew Colangelo, the prosecutor leading the case against him in New York, formerly was the third-ranking official in the Biden Justice Department before joining Bragg’s case against him in December 2022.
A criminal conviction would not bar Trump from seeking office, though some Democratic officials have tried to keep him off ballots, arguing he led an insurrection during the 2021 Capitol riot that disrupted certification of Biden’s victory. The US Supreme Court struck down those efforts in March.
Biden’s reference about Trump wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare was regarding a recent CNBC interview in which the ex-president said, “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.”
Trump later told Breitbart News, “There’s so much cutting and so much waste in so many other areas, but I’ll never do anything to hurt Social Security.”
