President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden soared out of Los Angeles on Sunday, Dec. 10, heading back to Washington, D.C. after three days of celebrity-studded fund-raising events, most of them in private homes in posh Southland neighborhoods.
In scattered speeches across the Southland, Biden appeared to affirm the campaign track that many Democratic pundits believe to be a major piece of his reelection strategy – shine the spotlight on the man who aims to forge a presidential rematch in November, former President Donald Trump.
During a Friday night gala in Holmby Hills – one of at least a half-dozen weekend events that raised millions of dollars amid A-list entertainers, show-business moguls and high-profile financiers – Biden spent about as much time taking swipes at GOP front-runner Trump as he did touting his own record.
“You’re the reason,” Biden told the crowd — co-hosted by such folks as former L.A. mayoral candidate and entrepreneur Rick Caruso and former Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco — “that Donald Trump is a former president, or he hates when I say it, a defeated president.”
Rhetoric swapped between the two political foes has grown increasingly bitter in the past few days, with Trump declaring Biden as “the destroyer of American democracy” last week. At Friday’s event, Biden declared: “The greatest threat Trump poses is to our democracy, because if we lost that, we lose everything.”
Trump said Tuesday in Iowa: “(Biden has) been weaponizing government against his political opponents like a Third World political tyrant.”
Biden took his turn at Friday night’s find-raiser: “The other day (Trump) said, ‘He would be a dictator only one day. Thank God. Only one day.”
Jill Biden, who campaigned in tandem with her husband in L.A. as well as individually, also took aim at Trump.
“I wish that this election were about simple policy differences,” she said during an appearance at Cedars Sinai…
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