President Donald Trump repeated his demand that Joe Biden takes a drug test before the Tuesday night debate.
Trump doubled down on the demand during a press conference on Sunday:
“I’m not joking. I’m willing to take a drug test, I think she [sic] should to,” Trump said during a Sunday evening news briefing at the White House.Trump then argued that Biden’s performances in the Democratic Party’s primary debates were inconsistent, which raised questions about whether he is taking something to help his focus.”I watched him with some of the — when he was debating ‘Pocahontas’ [Sen. Elizabeth Warren] and [Sen. Kamala] Harris, who treated him so badly, but I watched him and he was out of it. And then I watched him against Bernie Sanders and he was OK. He wasn’t great, but he wasn’t terrible,” Trump said.”If you look at some of those debates, I said there’s no way he can continue. He can’t continue. Then all of a sudden he debated ‘crazy’ Bernie Sanders, and you know what? The truth is he was OK. And I said, how did he go from there, those horrible performances, to where he was OK? I always joke, but it is true: He was no Winston Churchill in debating, but he was fine. And people say he was on performance-enhancing drugs.”When pressed on his claim, Trump said, “A lot of people have said that, a lot of people have written that. Take a look — you can just check out the internet, you’ll see plenty of people say it. Whether he is or not, doesn’t matter. But I would love to take a test, and he can take a test, too.”
Trump brought up drug tests in an interview with Byron York of The Washington Examiner in August:
“Nobody thought that he was even going to win,” Trump said. “Because his debate performances were so bad. Frankly, his best performance was against Bernie. We’re going to call for a drug test, by the way, because his best performance was against Bernie. It wasn’t that he was Winston Churchill because he wasn’t, but it was a normal, boring debate. You know, nothing amazing happened. And we are going to call for a drug test because there’s no way — you can’t do that.”
York asked Trump what he thought was going on with Biden. Trump said he does not know. But he does not think it’s a coincidence that Biden all of a sudden became better when he went up against Sanders:
Trump based his call entirely on his own observations and not on any actual knowledge of Biden’s actions. “All I can tell you is that I’m pretty good at this stuff,” he said. “I look. I watched him in the debates with all of the different people. He was close to incompetent, if not incompetent, and against Bernie, he was normal … and I say, ‘How does that happen?'”
Trump again suggested drug tests on Fox News on September 12:
“I think there’s probably – possibly – drugs involved,” Trump told Jeanine Pirro. “That’s what I hear. I mean, there’s possibly drugs. I don’t know how you can go from being so bad where you can’t even get out a sentence … ”Trump did not finish his own sentence, but he went on to say he was referring to the Democratic presidential nominee’s hesitant performances in early primary debates, before his surge to victory on the back of a win in South Carolina.“You saw some of those debates with the large number of people on the stage,” Trump said. “He was, I mean, I used to say, ‘How is it possible that he can go forward?”
Last week, Trump said both men should take drug tests before the debate.
Trump explained that no one should “underestimate” Biden since “he’s been doing this for 47 years.”
Trump also said that the Democrats will “give him a big fat shot in the ass and he comes out, and for two hours he’s better than ever before.”
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