President Biden showed his age at a campaign reception in Manhattan Wednesday — repeating statements about the 2017 Charlottesville riot and his decision to run for president in 2020 minutes apart and nearly word-for-word.
During remarks at the gathering hosted by billionaire real estate heiress Amy Goldman Fowler, the 80-year-old president recounted how he was enjoying retirement after two terms as Barack Obama’s vice president when “along came, in August of 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia.
“You remember those folks walking out of the fields literally carrying torches, with Nazi swastikas, holding them forward, singing the same vicious, antisemitic bile — the same exact bile — bile that was sung in — in Germany in the early ‘30s. And a young woman was killed. A young woman was killed.”
Biden went on to say, according to an official White House transcript, that “the former guy [then-President Donald Trump] was asked, ‘What do you think would happen?’ He was the sitting president. And he said, ‘I thought there were some very fine people on both sides.’ And I mean this sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, that’s when I decided I — I was going to run again.”