U.S. President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, both in their 70s, are sparring — at more than arm’s length — in a verbal schoolyard fight.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Biden assailed Trump’s moral standing after a 2005 video surfaced of Trump boasting that he could grope women with impunity because he was a star on his reality television show “The Apprentice.”
Biden, then the vice president and supporting Trump’s opponent, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, said if he had been in high school at the time with Trump he would have taken him outside and beaten him up.
And then Biden, now 75 and possibly eyeing a 2020 campaign for the White House against Trump, doubled down last week on his assessment of the 71-year-old Trump.
“A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it,'” Biden said. “They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said ‘no.’ I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.'”
“I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life,” the former vice president added. “I’m a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.”
By Thursday, serial tweeter Trump had had enough of Biden’s braggadocio.
“Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy,” Trump said on Twitter. “Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!”
For good measure, Trump added another attack on Clinton.
“Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary’s large and highly sophisticated staff,” Trump tweeted. “Well, not saying that anymore!”
