President Trump blasted his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, as “incompetent” and dismissed polls indicating that Biden was leading in the race for the White House.
In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, the president took aim at Biden’s legacy in Washington, saying that the former vice president showed a record of bad judgment.
“I don’t believe the polls,” Trump told the news outlet. “I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don’t think that they will put a man in who’s incompetent.”
“And I don’t mean incompetent because of a condition that he’s got now. I mean he’s incompetent for 30 years. Everything he ever did was bad. His foreign policy was a disaster,” he continued.
Trump went on to slam Biden’s victory over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the Democratic primary, for which he laid blame at the feet of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who he said stayed in the race and prevented Sanders from building a coalition that could defeat the former vice president.
“He should never have won the primary, ever in a million years, because those votes were taken away. They were taken away from Bernie Sanders. And I think I’m going to get a lot of Bernie Sanders voters,” Trump said.
Biden’s campaign did not immediately return a request for comment from The Hill.
Trump’s comments are some of the most direct he has aimed at the vice president since Biden clinched the Democratic nomination last month following Sanders’s withdrawal from the race.
Trump has in the past indicated that he believes Warren stayed in the race to spoil Sanders’s chances of obtaining the Democratic nomination and tweeted in March that Sanders “would have EASILY won” a number of other states in the primary, including Warren’s home state of Massachusetts, had she dropped out in the weeks prior.
Warren finished in third place in Massachusetts, winning 21 percent of the vote, and dropped out of the race two days later.
Trump’s comments to the outlet come after recent Reuters-Ipsos polls showed Biden with leads in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, key battleground states that all voted for Trump in 2016.