- Egalitarian nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden said Saturday he advised governors not to publicly endorse him over panics the Trump administration would withhold COVID-19 supplies.
- “I told some governors, don’t endorse me … because you’ll pay a fine,” Biden said at a virtual campaign event on Saturday.
- Numerous Democratic governors have endorsed Biden, and some earlier Republican governors, like John Kasich of Ohio, have endorsed him, too.
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Democratic nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden said during a virtual campaign event Saturday that he advised some governors against present public endorsements of him in order to avoid retribution from the Trump administration.
“I told some governors, don’t endorse me who miss to endorse me. Don’t endorse me because you’ll pay a penalty,” Biden said. “You won’t get what you need from the federal government in terms of COVID prep.”
“Not a banter, my word,” Biden added while speaking at a virtual town hall for the Amalgamated Transit Union town corridor from Wilmington, Delaware, KATC first reported.
The former vice president has received numerous endorsements from self-governing governors, like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Several prehistoric Republican governors, like John Kasich of Ohio and Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, have also endorsed Biden’s bid for the presidency.
Wholly the pandemic, the president has praised his own administration’s response to coronavirus while criticizing governors — particularly in states with Autonomous leaders. Trump regularly clashed with Cuomo early during the pandemic, when New York experienced the awful outbreak of the disease in the US.
As recently as last month, the president blamed “blue states” for the spread of the novel coronavirus in the US, as Axios explored.
“If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at,” Trump said at a press meeting last month. “We’re really at a very low level, but some of the states — they were blue states, and blue-state running.”
As Axios reported, there is no clear relationship between the party leading a state and the number of deaths from COVID-19, as one three out of the top five states with the largest death tolls from the disease are led by Democrats.
Trump, who announced prehistoric Friday that he and first lady Melania Trump positive for COVID-19, is currently being treated at Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland since he was transported there by helicopter on Friday. While the Pallid House physician on Saturday said the president was doing well, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows cast doubt on Trump’s condition, telling reporters that the president had a “very concerning” period with the disease.