Former President Trump said President Biden had “the right to run” for re-election and the Democratic Party “took it away” from him, while blasting his new opponent Kamala Harris as the “least admired, least respected, and worst vice president in the history of our country.”
Trump held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday afternoon after holding off-the-record meetings with major media outlets. The Trump campaign said the Republican presidential nominee wanted to address the media “while they were already in Palm Beach because he’s the most transparent candidate in history.”
Trump said Thursday that the U.S. is in “the most dangerous period of time I’ve ever seen for our country.”
“We have somebody that hasn’t received one vote for president, and she’s running, and that’s fine with me, but we were given Joe Biden, and now we’re given somebody else,” Trump said. “I think, frankly, I’d rather be running against somebody else, but that was their choice.”
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Both the Trump and Harris 2024 campaigns have put out ads attacking each other for their U.S. southern border policies. (Getty Images)
Trump said Harris is “a radical left person at a level that nobody’s seen,” and said her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is a “radical left man that has positions that are not even possible to believe they exist.”
“He’s heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds having to do with safety. He doesn’t want to have borders, he doesn’t want to have walls. He doesn’t want to have any form of safety for our country,” Trump said. “He doesn’t mind people coming in from prisons and neither does she — I guess because she couldn’t care less.”
Harris formally became the nominee after Biden suspended his re-election campaign and endorsed her amid pressure from within the Democratic Party. The Democratic National Committee formally nominated Harris as their nominee this week.
“The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden, and I’m no Biden fan,” Trump said. “From a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you look at, they took the presidency away, and people are saying he lost after the debate and he couldn’t win.”
“Whether he could win or he couldn’t, when he had the right to run, and they took it away, and they said they would use the 25th Amendment,” Trump continued.
Trump said the pressure from within the Democrat Party and “what they’ve done” is “pretty incredible.”
“Now I’m running against somebody else, and we’re leading. We’re leading — so I’m not complaining,” he said. “I’m saying, for a country with a Constitution that we cherish — we cherish this Constitution — to have done it this way is pretty severe, pretty horrible.”
Trump said he thought Democrats “would have gone out to a vote” or “would have had a primary system.”
“But just to take it away from him like he was a child?” Trump said, adding that Biden is “a very angry man right now.”
“I can tell you that he’s not happy with Obama, and he’s not happy with Nancy Pelosi,” Trump said. “He’s not happy with any of the people that told him ‘you’ve got to leave.’ He’s very unhappy, very angry.”
Former President Trump speaks at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention in Chicago on July 31. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
Trump said he thinks Biden “also blames” Harris.
“He’s trying to put up a good face, but it is a very bad thing in terms of a country when you do that,” Trump said. “I’m not a fan of his, as you probably have noticed, and he had a rough debate, but that doesn’t mean that you just take it away like that.”
He added: “You go out to a vote, you do something — he had 14 million votes. She had no votes.”
“And she’s crashing,” Trump said.
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“We have a vice president who is the least admired, least respected, and the worst vice president in the history of our country. The most unpopular vice president,” he said of Harris.
Trump also slammed Harris for not engaging with the media. Harris has been the de facto Democratic nominee for 18 days, and she has not held a formal press conference or sat for a wide-ranging interview.
Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, left, greets former President Trump during a campaign rally at Georgia State University in Atlanta on Saturday. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
“She’s not doing any news conference. You know why she’s not doing it? Because she can’t do a news conference. She doesn’t know how to do a news conference,” Trump said. “She’s not smart enough to do a news conference.”
Trump said he is “very happy to run against” Harris, and said he “hates to be defending” Biden, but pointed to the Constitution again.
“We have a Constitution. It’s a very important document, and we live by it. She has no votes, and I’m very happy to run against her. I’m not complaining from that standpoint. And I hate to be defending him, but he did not want to leave. He wanted to see if he could win,” Trump said. “They said, ‘You’re not going to win.’ After the debate, they said, ‘You’re not going to win. You can’t win. You’re out.'”
Trump said Democrats, after successfully pressuring Biden to drop out of the race, “just picked a person.”
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris appear on the Truman Balcony of the White House in Washington, D.C., on July 4. (Tierney L. Cross)
Trump, pointing to Harris’ failed 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, said she was “the first out.”
“She was the first loser. Okay. So we call her the first loser. She was the first loser when, during the primary system, during the Democrat primary system, she was the first one to quit, and she quit. She had no votes, no support, and she was a bad debater, by the way, a very bad debater,” Trump said. “And that’s not the thing I’m looking forward to. But she was a bad debater. She obviously did a bad job. She never made it to Iowa then, for some reason.”
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Trump said he thinks Biden “regrets” tapping Harris as vice president.
“He picked her and she turned on him, too. She was working with the people that wanted him out,” he said. “But the fact that you can get no votes, lose in the primary system. In other words, you had 14 or 15 people. She was the first one out, and that you can then be picked to run for president.”
Trump added: “It seems, seems to me actually unconstitutional. Perhaps it’s not.”