26 June 2020

Donald Trump slams ‘mortifyingly stupid’ Joe Biden after he makes gaffe by claiming ‘we have 120 million dead from COVID-19’

US president Donald Trump has blasted Joe Biden as ‘mortifyingly stupid’ after the Democratic nominee said 120 million Americans had died from Covid-19.

Biden made the error at a rally he was hosting in Pennsylvania. He said: “Now we have 120 million dead from Covid,” while the actual figure is around 124,000.

Trump jumped at the chance to embarrass his opponent as he shared a clip of Biden misspeaking and captioned it: "If I ever said something so mortifyingly stupid, the Fake News Media would come down on me with a vengeance. 

“This is beyond a normal mistake. Why isn’t the media reporting it?”

The President added fuel to the fire later on Fox News, telling host Sean Hannity it was not a ‘permissible type of error’.

He said: “That's not like an error, gee, it's a slip up. That's a serious error. That's not a permissible type of error, because there's something going on.

“You know, it's wonderful to say, 'Gee I feel sorry,' or 'It's too bad,' because I do. Except we're talking about the presidency of the United States, and it's just not acceptable.”

Trump added: 'It's so crazy what's happening.

“Here's a guy who doesn't talk. Nobody hears him. Whenever he does talk - he can't put two sentences together. I don't want to be nice or un-nice. I mean, the man can't speak.”

Biden was at the rally as one of his campaign stops. He has reignited his campaign to become president after he went into lockdown during the height of the pandemic.

And it wasn’t just the President himself who criticised Biden, Trump’s campaign team also took aim at the Democrat.

Known as Trump War Room on Twitter, they wrote: "Joe Biden is very confused. He just falsely claimed 120 million Americans (more than one-third of the country) died from the coronavirus.

“This is after he previously claimed 150 million Americans died from guns. He's not playing with a full deck, folks. #BarelyThereBiden”

Biden did suggest 150 million Americans had died from guns back in February of this year when he was ciriticised by his then opponent for the Democrat nomination Bernie Sanders.

The former Vice President criticised Sanders for voting in favour of legislation that gave gun manufacturers total immunity from liability of gun violence.

He said at the time: “150 million people have been killed since 2007 when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability, more than all the wars, including Vietnam from that point on.”

The actual figure showed that from 2007 to 2017, 373,663 people had died from gun violence.

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