On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” President Donald Trump called Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden “not competent to be president.”
Partial transcript as follows:
WALLACE: Mr. President, you’ll be happy to know that Fox News has a new poll out today and you’re going to be the very first person to hear about it. In the national horse race, Joe Biden leads you by 8 points, 49 percent to 41. That’s 3, 4 points slimmer than it was a month ago. And on the issues, people trust Biden more to handle the coronavirus by 17 points, on race relations by 21 points, and even on the economy they trust Biden more by 1 point. I understand you still have more than a hundred days to this election, but at this point you’re losing.
TRUMP: First of all, I’m not losing, because those are fake polls. They were fake in 2016 and now they’re even more fake. The polls were much worse in 2016. They interviewed 22 percent Republicans. Well, how do you do 22 percent Republican? You see what’s going on. I have other polls that put me leading, and we have polls where I’m leading. I have a poll where we’re leading in every swing state. And I don’t believe that your — first of all, the Fox polls, whoever does your Fox polls, they’re among the worst. They got it all wrong in 2016. They’ve been wrong on every poll I’ve ever seen.
WALLACE: I — I must tell you…
TRUMP: No, I’m just telling you. And let me ask you this, so on the economy — so I’ve always led on the economy by a lot.
WALLACE: I know, which is why I was surprised by this number.
TRUMP: Biden can’t put two sentences together. They wheel him out. He goes up — he repeats — they ask him questions. He reads a teleprompter and then he goes back into his basement. You tell me the American people want to have that in an age where we’re in trouble with other nations that are looking to do numbers on us.
WALLACE: So let me ask you a direct question.
TRUMP: No, no…
WALLACE: No, I’m going to ask you a direct question about Joe Biden. Is Joe Biden senile?
TRUMP: I don’t want to say that. I’d say he’s not competent to be president. To be president, you have to be sharp and tough and so many other things. He doesn’t even come out of his basement. They think, “Oh this is a great campaign.” So he goes in, I’ll then make a speech, it’ll be a great speech, and some young guy, starts writing, ‘Vice President Biden said this, this, this, this.’ He didn’t say it. Joe doesn’t know he’s alive, OK? He doesn’t know he’s alive. Do the American people want that, number one. Number two, I built the greatest economy ever built anywhere in the world; not only of this country, anywhere in the world. Until we got hit with the China virus. We got hit with the virus, shouldn’t have happened, and we had to close up, we saved millions of lives. Now we’ve opened it up, got to go back to school. We’re open. We’ve got to do things. We had the best job numbers we’ve ever had last month. We should have good ones coming up in two weeks. Look, I built the greatest economy in history, I’m now doing it again. You see the numbers; the numbers are through the roof. The Democrats are purposely keeping their schools closed, keeping their states closed. I called Michigan, I want to have a big rally in Michigan. Do you know we’re not allowed to have a rally in Michigan? Do you know we’re not allowed to have a rally in Minnesota? Do you know we’re not allowed to have a rally in Nevada? We’re not allowed to have rallies.
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