Trump Called Biden ‘Mental Retard,’ Believed He Might Be Replaced as Democratic Nominee, New Book Reports
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A new book about the 2020 election reports that Donald Trump believed Democrats might replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Wall Street Journal White House reporter Michael Bender has a book coming out in August titled Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, referencing the false statement Trump made late in election night.
A new report from Vanity Fair details some of Bender’s new reporting, including how the then-president apparently asked during an Oval Office meeting, “How am I losing in the polls to a mental retard?”
Trump also apparently believed that Biden would be replaced with another candidate, like Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama, because of what Dick Morris was telling him.
“The president, meanwhile, had often complained that his early attack on [Elizabeth] Warren had damaged her presidential bid, which he regretted because he viewed her as an easier opponent than Biden,” Bender writes. “Now he worried that a heavy blitz of attack ads would hasten the secret plot being hatched by Democrats, and his mind raced with who they might select in Biden’s place.”
Apparently things got to the point where Trump campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio pushed back on this idea in a memo, part of which Bender posted to Twitter Monday:
Fabrizio then spent several paragraphs outlining fairly basic math that showed Biden's nomination wasn't theoretical—he was on the verge of securing enough delegates to lock down the top spot on the ballot.
Here are the relevant pieces of that memo: pic.twitter.com/iwLDs6Kx4t
— Michael C. Bender (@MichaelCBender) June 7, 2021
Trump has continued pushing the big lie about the 2020 election over the past few months, including in his recent North Carolina speech.
