Vice President Mike Pence slammed Democratic candidate Joe Biden over his plan to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, asserting the Democrat copied it from the Trump administration’s actions.
Pence met Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Biden’s vice presidential pick, on a stage in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Wednesday night for the only vice presidential debate of the 2020 presidential campaign. Pence rebutted assertions that the Trump administration had failed the American people in its response to the pandemic and said that a Biden administration would not have acted much differently according to Biden’s own plan.
“The reality is when you look at the Biden plan, it reads an awful lot like what President Trump and I and our task force have been doing every step of the way. Quite frankly, when I look at their plan, which talks about advancing testing, creating new PPE, developing a vaccine, it looks a little bit like plagiarism, which is something Joe Biden knows a little bit about,” Pence said, referencing Biden’s history of plagiarism accusations dating back decades.
“I think the American people know that this is a president who has put the health of American people first. And the American people, I believe in my heart, can be proud of the sacrifices they have made. It saved countless American lives,” Pence said.
VP Mike Pence on the Biden/Harris plan for covid-19:
"It looks a little bit like Plagiarism, which is something Joe Biden knows a little bit about." pic.twitter.com/7qpI02QzEW
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) October 8, 2020
Pence’s Wednesday night debate performance is not the first time the Trump administration has accused Biden of ripping off the president’s agenda. In July, Trump accused Biden of copying Trump’s “Buy American” plan for the federal government to invest $700 billion in the U.S. economy.
“He plagiarized from me, but he can never pull it off,” Trump told a group of reporters. “He likes plagiarizing. It’s a plan that is very radical left, but he says the right things because he’s copying what I’ve done. But the difference is he can’t do it, and he knows he’s not doing that.”
“He can’t do the same because he’s raising taxes way too much; he’s raising everybody’s taxes. He’s also putting tremendous amounts of regulations back on, and those two things are two primary reasons that I created the greatest economy we’ve ever had, and now we’re creating it again,” he added.
Biden’s history with plagiarism dates back to his first run for president in 1987. Biden was accused of appropriating the phrases and mannerisms of a British politician without attribution. Together with a clip of him reacting angrily to a New Hampshire voter, the scandal helped tank his run, and he announced he was withdrawing from the race 11 days after the news broke.
Biden insulted the New Hampshire voter’s intelligence and made false statements about his own family, claiming that he was the first in his family to go to college and later admitting that what he said was not true.
Biden told the voter:
I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my — in my class to have a full academic scholarship. In the first year in law school I decided didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class, and then decided I wanted to stay, went back to law school, and in fact ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot-court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits — I only needed 123 credits. And I’d be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like, Frank.