As Donald Trump exited a Manhattan courtroom Wednesday, he marked the final day of his hush money trial by comparing himself to an actual saint.
“Mother Teresa could not beat these charges,” Trump told a throng of reporters. “These charges are rigged. The whole thing is rigged.”
In Mother Teresa’s defense, she likely never would have found herself embroiled in an adulterous affair with a porn star while seeking to be elected leader of the free world.
As Trump sulked in his martyrdom, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris launched their campaign’s “Black voters for Biden-Harris” initiative with a rare joint appearance in the swing state of Pennsylvania.
In 2020, Biden won 92% of Black voters, according to Pew Research Center, but recent polls have suggested some softening among the cohort.
But any lack of enthusiasm for a second Biden term wasn’t evident at the Philadelphia rally, where Biden and Harris were greeted with chants of “Four more years!”
“With your vote in 2024, we’re gonna make Donald Trump a loser again,” Biden told the crowd at Girard College, a predominantly Black boarding school.
Biden took Trump to task for the “MAGA lies” he has peddled about his record of accomplishments for Black Americans. Trump has claimed sole credit for getting pandemic relief checks to Americans, Biden said, instead of crediting the Congressional Black Caucus with passing that legislation and cutting child poverty in half for Black families.
Biden also pointed out that Trump did not preside over record-low unemployment for Black Americans.
“The fact is, record-low unemployment happened on my watch and we’re going to keep it going,” Biden said.
Biden and Harris both raised the threat of Trump making more Supreme Court appointments if he wins another term.
“Guess what? The next president is gonna be able to appoint a couple justices,” Biden said. “Tell me that won’t change your life when Trump justices are already gutting voting rights, overturning Roe, decimating affirmative action, and so much more.”
The vice president harkened back to 2016, when Trump regularly told Black voters they might as well roll the dice on him.
“Donald Trump once asked Black Americans,” she said, “‘What the hell do you have to lose from a Trump presidency?'”
When Trump was president, Harris continued, he repeatedly tried to end the Affordable Care Act and take health care from millions of Black Americans.
“Year after year, he proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare,” she said, “so that so many of our seniors would be deprived of what they rely on to live with dignity.”
Finally, Trump “handpicked three members of the United States Supreme Court,” Harris said, with “the intention that they would overturn Roe v. Wade.” And they did, she pointed out.
“Today,” Harris continued, “one in three women—and more than half of Black women of reproductive age—live in a state with an abortion ban, a Trump abortion ban. And if he wins a second term, I promise you he’s going to go even further.”
“Who sits in the White House matters,” she concluded.
The presidential contest is tight in Pennsylvania, with the current 538 polling aggregate putting Trump a couple of points ahead.
But Trump has had warning signs there too, with his GOP rival Nikki Haley winning 17% in last month’s closed Republican primary long after she dropped out of the race.
Biden’s Philadelphia trip marked his sixth to the Keystone State this year.
Trump held his first rally in the battleground state last month just outside of Allentown, blasting the hush money case in which he now awaits a verdict as one of Biden’s “communist show trials.”
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