Stephen A. Smith is calling out Democrats for relying on an octogenarian such as President Biden to beat former President Trump at the ballot box.
“It is an absolute disgrace on the part of the Democratic Party — Democrats, liberals … progressives — and you’re begging an 82-year-old man to run for reelection,” Smith said in a Tuesday interview on SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show.”
“What the hell have you been doing that in the year 2024 you have to rely on an 82-year-old to beat a 78-year-old man with four indictments, 91 counts against him?” Smith asked.
Biden is 81, while Trump is 77.
“How the hell are we sitting here in the year 2024 and that’s what you need in order to beat him?” the ESPN personality and podcast host exclaimed to Stern.
“Not Nikki Haley. Not Chris Christie. Not even Ron DeSantis,” Smith continued.
“No, you need an 82-year-old man to run for reelection because you could not come up — over the span of the last six, seven years — you couldn’t come up with a candidate that’s more capable of beating Donald Trump,” Smith said.
“I think that is the ultimate indictment against the Democratic Party. I think that they have dropped the ball on a litany of issues, which are things I’ve told some of them to their face,” Smith, who described himself as an independent, said.
Stern, who’s been a prominent critic of Trump, told Smith that he disagreed.
“I think the Democratic Party is in a bind because the public has gotten so wacky. It has nothing to do with the candidates. There’s many fine candidates,” Stern, 70, said.
“The country has gone so berserk that literally you can’t even get good people, qualified people to even run for office,” Stern told Smith.
“They’re dropping like flies because when you run for office now, you get death threats. You get people ready to blow you up. They’re ready to f— you over. I think some of our best and brightest are saying ‘hell no’ to politics,” Stern said.
“I’m not saying that Biden is awful,” Smith said of the current commander in chief. “What I’m saying is, you’re asking me to look at an 82-year-old man who seems to have lost a little bit of his step at the very least, and say, ‘Invest four more years in him.’”
“I have nothing against the man personally. My issue with him is his age,” Smith, 56, said.
“It’s not because of his age, it’s because he doesn’t appear as cogent as I’d like him to be,” he explained.
“I’m not enamored with either candidate. I don’t like Trump because I think that he’ll cause civil war in this country, and I think he will be on a vengeance tour as the president of the United States if he were to get reelected,” Smith said.
But, Smith added, despite not being captivated by either 2024 White House hopeful, “I would vote for Biden any day of the week ahead of Trump.”