Donald Trump likes to take shots at his old rivals; it’s far from rare for him to say something negative, out of nowhere, about Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. This week, he did the same to Joe Biden.
Biden, who had mostly kept a low profile since leaving office in January, resurfaced this week to give a speech mostly about Social Security. Speaking to the national conference of Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled in Chicago, the former president accused the current one of “taking a hatchet” to Social Security.
Joe Biden accuses Trump and Musk of taking ‘hatchet’ to social security
In first speech since leaving office, ex-president spoke of ‘destruction’ current administration has wrought
By Lauren Gambino in https://t.co/SdvQD3eTIJ pic.twitter.com/0btrbwCxYb— Michael Goldfarb (@mgoldfarb999) April 16, 2025
“In the 90 years since Franklin Roosevelt created the social security system, people have always gotten their social security checks,” Biden said in the speech, as reported by The Guardian. “They’ve gotten them during wartime, during recessions, during a pandemic. No matter what, they got them. But now, for the first time ever, that might change. It’d be a calamity for millions of families.”
“In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction,” Biden said in the speech. “It’s kind of breathtaking that it could happen that soon.”
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
Trump, of course, couldn’t let an insult pass without commenting himself. Or rather, putting a brief clip of the speech on Truth Social, featuring an out-of-context clip of Biden talking about Black people in Scranton when he was young.
“I’d never seen—hardly any black people Scranton at the time and I was only going in fourth grade,” Biden said in the speech. “I remember seeing the kids going by—at the time called ‘colored kids’—on a bus going by.”
However, the clip omitted the context, as Biden said immediately after, he was inspired to get into politics because those segregated buses “sparked his outrage.”
“Nothing has changed as Crooked Joe Biden continues to beclown himself, proving to the world his feeble mind is in a rapid decline to new lows with this incoherent speech,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said on X.
It used to be rare for immediate past presidents to be so critical of their successor so soon after leaving office, but Trump certainly did not respect that tradition during his four years out of office.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
