Former President Donald Trump said Monday that President Joe Biden’s State of The Union (SOTU) address was “good enough to get him over the heap.”
Biden gave his SOTU address Thursday night, leading with topics like the war in Ukraine, Jan. 6 Capitol riots and COVID-19 pandemic. Trump said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that Biden’s “very angry” speech was “good enough” for him to remain the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential candidate.
“I assume he’s going to be the candidate,” Trump said. “I think it probably may be — it was a terrible performance, but I think it was probably good enough to get him over the heap. To get him over the, you know, the barrier as to whether or not he’s going to be their nominee.”
Biden’s reelection campaign and officials banked on the president’s SOTU speech to help reset his 2024 bid as concerns emerged regarding him trailing Trump in the polls, Axios reported. Trump leads Biden in hypothetical rematches across several key swing states, including Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Nevada. (RELATED: CNN Data Analyst Breaks Down Impact Of Biden’s SOTU Address On Voters)
“I heard a very angry man whose losing badly in the polls, whose willing to weaponize government like has never taken place in this country,” Trump said of Biden. “It has taken place in third-world countries quite often, actually. And they’re willing to use the justice department to sue opponents like me — cause I’m his only opponent other than life, life itself. And frankly, you know, I saw a very angry and confused man.”
Trump said that he thought Biden’s speech was the “worst State of the Union ever made” and described it as “a speech on division and hate more than anything else.”
The former president also criticized Biden for spending too much time “talking about Snickers,” referring to “shrinkflation.” He emphasized that there were more significant examples of inflation in the United States economy.
“You don’t really wanna talk about Snickers, even though it’s true, that they put a little bit less in the bag. But you have more interesting examples of inflation and other things that he was trying to point out than that,” Trump said. “You have a lot of big-league things you could be talking about, like energy prices through the roof and food prices through the roof.”