President Trump’s oldest son defended on Sunday his father’s reelection chances amid flagging poll numbers and criticized presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s economic plan as “asinine.”
Speaking on “Sunday Morning Futures,” Donald Trump Jr. blamed the president’s drop in the polls on the media coverage Trump has received recently – saying news outlets have been critical of the president while ignoring going after Biden.
“I think when you have the media onslaught where media has just totally abdicated their position to objectively look at both sides,” Trump Jr. said. “They’re not looking into any of Biden’s past. They’re not looking into any of his history.”
He added: “They want to do whatever they can to keep the American people from actually seeing Biden. He hasn’t been defined. And the media is trying to make sure that no one gets to define Joe Biden, because once he is, you’ll see how terrible this notion could be for America.”
PROFESSOR DOUBLES DOWN ON PREDICTION MODEL OF TRUMP’S CHANCES IN 2020
While the polling gap between Trump and Biden has narrowed a bit since the former vice president held a double-digit led over the current White House occupant late last month, a RealClearPolitics average of polls still has Biden up nine points on the president with less than five months to go before November’s general election.
Trump Jr. also hit Biden on the Democratic candidate’s recently released “Build Back Better” plan, which proposes spending $700 billion on American products and research — in the hopes of bringing back millions of jobs lost by an economy flattened by the coronavirus pandemic.
“You know that Joe Biden can sell this notion of ‘now we’re going to be buy American after 50 years of legislation that sent our jobs, that sent our American Dream to China,’” Trump Jr. said. “It’s asinine.”
Trump Jr. also accused Biden of using his time in public office to enrich his own family and once again questioned why the media isn’t looking into the matter.
“I called it liberal privilege because we hear a lot about privilege these days, but liberal privilege is the ultimate because they can say one thing, do the other and never get called on it,” he said.
In an interview earlier this year, Trump Jr. called out Hunter Biden’s business deals in Ukraine while his father was vice president.
“I was an international business person before my father got into politics. That’s what we did. I’m not going to say I haven’t benefited from my father’s last name, just like Hunter Biden did. That’d be foolish to say,” Trump Jr. said during an interview with Axios in March. “But, I haven’t benefited from my father’s taxpayer-funded office.”
“All of the sudden, he [Hunter Biden] goes over to the Ukraine and he’s making 83K a month, so the media likes to do this, sort of false equivalence. ‘You’re doing this, you’re doing that,” Trump Jr. said at the time. “We stopped doing any new international business deals when my father won the presidency.”
Joe Biden on Thursday introduced his plan that also seeks to create 5 million new jobs and is the first of four economic proposals Biden is expected to roll out over the coming weeks.
The American-centric proposals spotlighted by Biden will compete in this year’s White House race with the “America first” agenda long pushed by Trump, who has emphasized protecting American workers and reenergizing domestic industries in decline while moving away from free trade and a global economy.
The first part of the former vice president’s proposal is a $400 billion investment by the federal government to purchase American products such as cement, concrete, steel, and other materials to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.
The second part is a $300 billion investment in research for new technologies, such as electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and 5G.
Biden’s plan also calls for new tax breaks and credits for small manufacturers – including those run by minorities and women – and would levy penalties on companies who take federal money and then move their investments overseas. The campaign says that Biden will also push federal investments toward overlooked parts of the country that have not received government help.
Biden’s proposals appear to be an acknowledgment of the political success the president has enjoyed pushing his “America First” agenda. Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election was in part due to his promises of bringing back American jobs and re-inflating flagging industries. And as president, he’s waged an aggressive trade war with China and slapped tariffs on other nations, including longtime allies
