In a speech Monday that followed the Electoral College giving him enough votes to secure the presidency, Joe Biden attacked President Donald Trump and other top Republicans.
In a speech where Biden repeatedly coughed and had to clear his throat, the 78-year-old used his margin of victory in the Electoral College to take a shot at Trump after he said in 2016 that he had won in a “landslide” after winning by the same margin.
“More than 81 million of those votes were casts for me and Vice President-elect Harris. That too is a record. More than any ticket has received in the history of America,” Biden said. “It represents a winning margin of more than 7 million votes over the number of votes cast for my opponent. Together, the Vice President-elect Harris and I earned 306 electoral votes, well exceeding the 270 electoral votes needed to secure victory. Three hundred six electoral votes is the same number of electoral votes that Donald Trump and Vice President Pence received when they won in 2016. At the time, President Trump calls the Electoral College tally a ‘landslide.’ By his own standards, these numbers represented a clear victory then, and I respectfully suggest they do so now.”
Biden referenced the numerous lawsuits brought forth by the Trump campaign and said they “in every case, no cause or evidence was found to reverse or question or dispute the results.”
Biden claimed that Trump was making an “unprecedented assault on our democracy” by making “baseless claims about the legitimacy of the results.”
“Even more stunning, 17 Republican Attorneys General, and 126 Republican members of the Congress, actually, they actually signed onto a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas,” Biden continued. “That lawsuit asked the United States Supreme Court to reject the certified vote counts in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This legal maneuver was an effort by elected officials and one group of states to try to get the Supreme Court to wipe out the votes of more than 20 million Americans in other states. And to hand the presidency to a candidate who lost the Electoral College, lost the popular vote, and lost each and every one of the states whose votes they were trying to reverse. It’s a position so extreme, we’ve never seen it before.”
After attacking the Trump administration and Republicans, Biden said, “and now it’s time to turn the page as we’ve done throughout our history, to unite, to heal.”
Biden did not talk about the federal criminal investigation into his son, Hunter Biden, and ignored a question from a reporter about it, saying, “Thanks for the congratulations, appreciate it.”
ICYMI — Here was Biden's snide comment to Fox's Peter Doocy when he again tried to ask him about the Hunter Biden investigation: "Thanks for the congratulations. Appreciate it." pic.twitter.com/3cgSzQUNFU
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) December 15, 2020
Last week, when Biden was asked if he had spoken with his son and whether his son had committed a crime, Biden responded, “I’m proud of my son.”
Q: "Did Hunter Biden commit a crime? Have you spoken to your son Mr. President-elect?"
President-elect @JoeBiden: "I'm proud of my son." pic.twitter.com/Pa01cKnbZ9
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 11, 2020