Former President Joe Biden stood before a South Carolina crowd on Friday and took aim at President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.
“Is he still talking?” Biden asked, to laughter.
The reference to Trump’s Tuesday-night speech, which went on a record 1 hour and 47 minutes, would be the mildest criticism Biden leveled at the president.
During his roughly 20 minutes of remarks, Biden accused Trump of having a “weird obsession with Barack Obama” and scheming to “steal the election” by attempting to put up roadblocks to voting in the midterms. He then simply stated there was “something wrong with this guy.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Biden spoke in Columbia, South Carolina, on Friday, where party leaders and donors honored his lifetime achievement. Biden paid tribute to the Southern state that six years earlier gave him a pivotal presidential primary win, putting him on a trajectory to claim the White House in 2020. The address was a rare public speech by Biden since he left office last year.
Biden grew sullen as he spoke of the surge of immigration agents in Minnesota that resulted in the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
“My friends, I can’t sugarcoat this,” Biden said. “These are dark days.”
And he hit Trump for ignoring those violent events in Minnesota during the State of the Union.
“He doesn’t mention Renee Good, Alex Pretti, who were killed by Minnesota ICE — in Minnesota by ICE — offer even a word of solace to their families,” Biden said, appearing to mispronounce Pretti’s last name. “He doesn’t offer a word of support, even recognition to Epstein’s victims sitting in front of him. During the entire time he never acknowledged them.”
Before the 2024 election, Biden handpicked the state to become the first to vote in a Democratic primary. Now, ahead of 2028, South Carolina is trying to hold on to that spot. While Biden didn’t explicitly call for party leaders to stick with South Carolina, he made the case for its strength as a political prognosticator.
“I knew if I won the nomination, I’d win the presidency, because I knew what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama knew before me: South Carolina picks presidents,” Biden said. “Not a joke, folks. When it mattered, you were there for me.”
In 2020, Biden limped into the South Carolina primary after suffering dramatic defeats in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire. He claimed second in Nevada — at a distance from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — before going on to win South Carolina. His decisive victory in a state with a majority-Black voting electorate proved he could appeal to a critical Democratic voting bloc, and it cleared the field. Other Democrats swiftly dropped out of the race and lined up to back Biden.
Biden exited the White House last year with a tarnished reputation within his own party after he sought a second term in office amid concerns about his age and questions over whether he suffered cognitive decline. Biden bowed out late into the campaign, giving then-Vice President Kamala Harris just 108 days to make her case to the public.
Now, a year into a second Trump presidency, Biden was back to highlight the current president’s low marks with voters and characterize the Republican’s tenure as a step back from what he left behind.
Biden ticked off his own victories in office — including his own actions to take on Big Pharma, like capping the cost of insulin and building job growth. He accused Trump of setting back the country’s stature on the world stage and touted job growth and a drop in crime during his own term.
Trump clinched the 2024 election in part because of voters’ discontent with border security. Under Biden, immigration surged, and tens of thousands of migrants were bused to major cities in the nation’s interior, competing for public resources.
Biden recalibrated and attempted to negotiate a bipartisan immigration deal with Congress, but it was scuttled. By the time he enacted more immigration restrictions, discontent brewed within Biden’s own party.
Trump has repeatedly railed against Biden’s posture on immigration, accusing him of having open borders. Today, it’s Trump’s deportation operations that are falling out of favor with Americans. In a recent NBC News poll, 60% of those surveyed in the week after Pretti’s death, somewhat or strongly disapproved of Trump’s actions on border security and immigration.
On Friday, Biden seemed to address criticism of his own handling of the issue.
“Despite the fact that Covid drove migration to record levels all around the world, the day I left office, border crossings in the United States were lower than the day that I entered the office I inherited from Trump,” Biden said. “That’s just a fact.”
