Joe Biden, the presumptive Democrat nominee, took a shot at President Donald Trump’s relentless social media use on Monday by wryly attempting to christen him “President Tweety.”
Biden, who just last week claimed he was resisting giving the president a nickname, floated the new epithet during a video appearance before the AAPI Victory Fund, a Super PAC working to mobilize Asian American voters ahead of the 2020 election.
“Trump is out there tweeting again this morning, I call him ‘President Tweety,'” Biden said, proceeding to lambast Trump’s push to reopen the economy amid the COVID19 pandemic. “How are we supposed to [reopen] if you’re sitting on the money small businesses need in order to stay alive?”
“Stop tweeting about it,” the former vice president added. “Get the money out to main street now.”
The effectiveness of Biden’s nickname for Trump has yet to be seen. It has, however, already elicited a response from the president’s eldest son, who poked fun at the creativity behind its conception on Monday.
‘President Tweety’ is exactly the type of high-quality nickname that you would expect to come from someone who uses the phrase ‘lying dog-faced pony soldier’ like it’s a normal thing to say,” Donald Trump, Jr. wrote shortly after Biden’s AAPI remarks began circulating on social media. “So cringeworthy!”
This is not the first time the former vice president has sought to even the playing field with Trump when it comes to the branding of political opponents.
“There’s so many nicknames I’m inclined to give this guy. “You can just start with clown,” Biden told supporters during a closed-door fundraiser in South Carolina last year. He added that “no-good S.O.B.” might do as well.
Eventually, Biden opted not to use either, telling supporters, “I’m not going to do is get into what he wants me to do. He wants this to be a mud wrestling match.”
Trump, for his part, infamously coined the moniker “Sleepy Joe” for the former vice president early last year. That nickname, supposedly a reference to Biden’s age and frequent gaffes, has become something of a rallying cry for Trump supporters, much as “Crooked Hillary” was used to lambast former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.