President Joe Biden made some not-so-subtle comments about newly elected President Donald Trump as he spoke from St. Croix on Sunday evening about the life of the late President Jimmy Carter.
Biden repeated several times that the 100-year-old Carter stood for “decency.”
“Can you imagine Jimmy Carter walking past someone who needs something and just keeps walking?” Biden asked. “Can you imagine Jimmy Carter referring to someone by the way he looks or the way he talks?”
“I can’t do it, I can’t do it,” Biden said.
During his nearly nine years in politics, Trump has often mocked opponents, including the way they look and how they talk.
Trump has mimicked Biden’s stutter a number of times.
Speaking to reporters during his traditional New Year’s holiday in the US Virgin Islands, Biden emphasized that Americans would “do well to try to be a little more like Jimmy Carter” as he alluded to the current state of toxic politics.
“In today’s world, some look at Jimmy Carter and see a man from a bygone era, with honesty and character, faith and humility… But I don’t think that’s a bygone era. I see a man not just of our time, but of all time,” Biden argued.
President Joe Biden made some not-so-subtle comments about President-elect Donald Trump as he spoke from St. Croix on Sunday evening about the life of the late President Jimmy Carter
“Someone who embodied the most basic human values that we can never let slip,” Biden continued. “Although it sometimes seems that way,” he said aside.
The president spent nine minutes in front of the cameras, coughing as he got going.
He said Carter was a “statesman and humanitarian” but also a close friend of Biden and the first lady.
“I’ve been around Jimmy Carter for over 50 years when it dawned on me,” the 82-year-old president said.
“I was always proud to say, and he often kidded me about it, that I was the first national figure to support him in 1976 when he ran for president,” Biden recalled.
Biden had entered the US Senate four years earlier at the age of 30.
“There was an overwhelming reason for it,” Biden said of Carter’s support. ‘His character.’
Carter would win the White House in 1976, but, like Biden, would serve only one term.
“What I find extraordinary about Jimmy Carter, though, is that millions of people around the world, all over the world, feel like they’ve lost a friend too, even if they’ve never met him,” Biden said. “And that’s because Jimmy Carter lived a life measured not by words, but by his actions.”