Biden Reminds Everyone He's Definitely Still Running for President

Former Vice President Joe Biden made sure people knew he’s not dropped out of the presidential race on Wednesday.

“Let me make something clear to Trump and his hatchet men and the special interests funding his attacks against me—I’m not going anywhere,” Biden said during a rally in Reno, NV.

Biden finds himself at the center of the controversy fueling Democrats’ impeachment efforts. According to a whistleblower complaint, Trump reached out to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to ask him to investigate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Biden is apparently taking that to mean that he is a potent political threat, when to me it’s clear that Trump is mostly a paranoid narcissist.

“He’s afraid of just how badly I would beat him next November,” Biden said.

He continued: “He imagines that this tactic will allow him to pick his opponent and face only the candidates he thinks he can beat. Well, we’re not going to let Donald Trump choose the Democratic candidate.”

So far during his campaign, Biden has faced scrutiny about his relationship with fossil fuel executives, his history of making women physically uncomfortable, and his ties to defense contractors, to name just a few issues. Yet despite all this, he is pushing hard to become the one to run against Trump.

“It’s not about Donald Trump’s antics,” Biden said. “It’s about what has brought Donald Trump, and the nation, to this sobering moment in our history, and to the choice facing us in 2020,” he said. “What has brought us here is simply this: the abuse of power.”

This is an unusually out-of-touch point for Biden to try to make, even for him. If he is genuinely interested in “what has brought us here,” it’s hard not to look to the abuses of power in the previous presidential administration. Recently, Biden has been condemned for his role in cruel Obama-era immigration policies that paved the way for Trump’s devastating tactics. Yeah, he totally understands that nuance.

“A lot of my opponents say we have to do more than just beat Donald Trump. I agree,” he said. “We have to do more than beat Donald Trump. We have to beat him like a drum.”

Cool!

Biden then continued in his speech to describe Trump, this time focusing on his tweets: “Desperate and defensive, Trump sends one crazed tweet after another—insinuating that the whistleblower should be dealt with extensively, using the word ‘executed,’ threatening to prosecute the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warning direly of civil war if he is impeached.”

OK, so definitely a lot of thoughts happening there. Sure, Trump is absolutely defensive, but who was it that said “I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done?”