Florida fundraiser

Biden mocks Trump during Florida fundraiser

He lamented that Florida had faced a “real dose of Trumpism.”

By KIMBERLY LEONARD

President Joe Biden came to South Florida to cash in and dump all over Donald Trump.

During a fundraiser in Jupiter, Florida, on Tuesday, Biden rallied donors to help him make Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, a “loser again” and made the sign of the cross after bemoaning that Florida faced a “real dose of Trumpism.”

The president accused Trump of leaving the U.S. a “mess” when he came into office during the height of the Covid pandemic and when the economy was “reeling.” Biden swiped his opponent on mass shootings, the economy, abortion rights and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“He got us to imagine what life was like under Trump and what it would be like again if Trump were to be reelected,” said Betsy Sheerr, a retiree who attended the event and was a Democratic Party activist and communications specialist. “He drew a sharp contrast between the two views.”

Biden ended his speech with the lofty prediction that he could win Florida, though he lost the state to Trump by more than three percentage points in 2020 and polling shows him trailing by double digits. The president’s speech was right in Trump’s backyard: Jupiter is located in Palm Beach County, where Trump is a resident and where he’s been charged with hoarding classified documents at his Mar-A-Lago estate after leaving the White House.

According to a pool report of Biden’s comments, the president did not address the Middle East crisis during the fundraiser, even in the wake of a drone strike launched by Iranian proxies in Jordan that killed three American soldiers. He did address the matter briefly to reporters outside the White House on Tuesday morning, saying, without details, that the U.S. planned to respond.

Biden also only briefly mentioned Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in passing and didn’t mention Trump’s indictments, said Biden donor Bonnie Lautenberg, an artist and wife of the late Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey who attended Tuesday’s event in Jupiter that had roughly 100 guests.

The president boasted about the current state of the economy, taking a moment to bash comments Trump made during a TV interview this month, when he said he hoped the economy would nose-dive before the election. Trump said at the time that he didn’t want to wind up like former President Herbert Hoover, who saw the stock market crash during his first year in office.

Biden told donors at the Jupiter fundraiser, held at the waterfront Pelican Club, that he thought Trump said that because he knew the economy was strong and that it was “bad for him politically.”

“I think it’s close to un-American,” he said. “How can anyone, especially a former president of the United States, wish for an economic crash that would devastate the United States?” He then mockingly called Trump “Donald Herbert Hoover Trump,” a nickname he’s used before, and was met with laughter in the room, per the pool report.

Biden also joked that Trump was already like Hoover because the U.S. had “fewer jobs when he left office than when he came into office.”

“I was glad to see him make a joke about Trump, because Trump puts down everybody,” Lautenberg said. “He always has nicknames.”

Becoming more serious, Biden also criticized Trump’s comments “to get over,” a mass shooting at Perry High School in Iowa. Sheerr said the president “appeared very somber, shocked and angry” during that part of the speech.

Asked about the fundraiser, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called Biden “delusional” for thinking he could win Florida.

“Americans know that they were better off with President Trump,” he said. “After almost four years of Crooked Joe’s disastrous presidency, we need a return to America First policies that successfully kept our country safe and supercharged the economy for all Americans.”

Both Sheerr and Lautenberg said Biden received the biggest applause of the Jupiter event when he raised the issue of abortion rights. Sheerr said Biden had specifically referenced Democrats’ chances in Florida in light of the ballot measure that’s expected to go before voters in November, which would legalize abortion for up to 24 weeks in a pregnancy, doing away with the state’s current 15-week ban that doesn’t have exceptions for rape or incest.

The president also addressed another group of donors later in the day at a fundraiser at the Coral Gables home of Biden Victory Fund finance chair Chris Korge, repeating some of the same lines of attack against Trump. The chair previously said he hoped the event would be among the largest fundraisers for a presidential candidate ever hosted in Florida.

Biden, the Democratic National Committee and their joint-fundraising committees raised more than $97 million in the final three months of 2023, the campaign announced this month.