Vice President Joe Biden is planning a detailed denunciation of Donald Trump’s proposed foreign policy on Monday, including repudiating the presumptive GOP nominee’s embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Biden will deliver his rebuttal to Trump’s ideas during an afternoon address at a foreign policy conference in Washington. The event is focused on setting the national security agenda for the next commander in chief.
“Our leadership does not spring from some inherent American magic — it never has. We earn it — over and over — through hard work and discipline,” Biden will say at the Center for a New American Security’s National Security Inheritance conference, according to excerpts of his prepared remarks.
The prepared text didn’t mention the real estate mogul by name, but the allusions to Trump are plain.
“That’s what has always made America great,” Biden will say, appropriating Trump’s own campaign slogan. “Not empty bluster. Not a sense of entitlement that fundamentally disrespects our partners. Not the attitude and insecurity of a bully.”
Trump’s praise of Putin — he’s called the Russian President “a leader, unlike what we have in this country” — also comes under fire in Biden’s speech.
“Embracing Putin at a time of renewed Russian aggression could call into question America’s longstanding commitment to a Europe whole, free and at peace,” Biden says in his remarks, adding it also isn’t appropriate to “dust off the Cold War playbook.”
The border wall that Trump has promised between the United States and Mexico, paired with disdainful rhetoric about immigrants, could reverse progress in the Western Hemisphere, Biden predicts, allowing “a return of anti-Americanism and a corrosive rift throughout our hemisphere.”
The vice president, along with President Barack Obama, endorsed Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton more than a week ago but has yet to appear on the campaign trail for the former secretary of state.
The first joint Obama-Clinton campaign appearance was postponed from last Wednesday after the terror attack in Orlando. But Obama nonetheless chastised Trump from Washington, declaring after a meeting with his National Security Council that the businessman’s proposed ban on Muslims was harmful and un-American.
Biden will underscore that assessment on Monday, broadening his criticism to include Trump’s suggested revival of harsh interrogation techniques that Obama prohibited when he took office.
“Adopting the tactics of our enemies — using torture, threatening to kill innocent family members, indiscriminately bombing civilian populations — not only violates our values, it’s deeply damaging to our security,” Biden plans to say.
“Wielding the politics of fear and intolerance — like proposals to ban Muslims from entering the United States or slandering entire religious communities as complicit in terrorism — calls into question America’s status as the greatest democracy in the history of the world.”
He’ll argue that Trump’s platform “will only make the problem worse” and “plays into the narrative of extremists.”
“We shouldn’t give them what they want,” the vice president will insist. “We are so much better than that.”
