Joe Biden called Donald Trump “a loser” in a pugnacious speech on Saturday that invoked his presidential successor’s attempted makeover of Washington DC to portray him as incompetent, corrupt and vain.
He delivered those remarks while giving the keynote address at a gala in Hanover, Maryland, hosted by the state’s Democratic party, which is hoping to help wrest control of Congress away from Trump and his Republican allies during November’s midterm elections.
Biden’s 10-minute discourse touched on Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make space for a ballroom, the court-ordered removal of his name after he added it to the facade of the John Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, his plans for a triumphal arch, and the algae bloom that undermined his $14.7m renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.
But “it’s not just his vanity projects” in the nation’s capital city that are a disgrace, Biden contended. He also invoked how the administration has been seeking to compensate those convicted of – and then presidentially pardoned for – roles in the violent attack at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 after Trump’s first Oval Office term ended in defeat to Biden.
“Whoa!” Biden said while reciting all of that. “What a loser.”
The reflecting pool project in particular – for which the federal government awarded a $1.7m no-bid, filtration system contract to a Trump donor who is a neighbor of the president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida – “reflects something even worse than the narcissism and incompetence at the core of this administration,” Biden continued.
“It’s the corruption – the corruption, the brazen, blatant corruption,” Biden said. “Corruption on a scale never seen before in American history in any administration.”
Biden also criticized Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin after the Russian leader’s forces invaded Ukraine in 2022. And Biden accused Trump of “deliberate distortion and destruction” of the Nato military alliance, widely seen as strained by the war that the US and Israel started in Iran in late February.
“He’s diminished our standing in the world more than any president in history has,” Biden, 83, said of Trump, 80.
Biden’s comments on Saturday came exactly two years after a disastrous televised debate with Trump – a relentless critic of his – that preceded his decision to drop out of running for re-election in the November 2024 presidential race.
Trump subsequently won a second White House term by defeating Biden’s endorsed candidate, Vice-President Kamala Harris.
It also came at a time when his family was conspicuously becoming more visible on the political scene in the wake of his departure from office.
For instance, former first lady Jill Biden published her memoir View from the East Wing on 2 June. She appeared at an event promoting the book that day and – among other things – said her husband’s cancer diagnosis, announced in May 2025, “really puts life into perspective”.
Biden’s son Hunter, meanwhile, has gained himself fans through self-deprecating social media posts covering topics such as politics, mental health and addiction recovery – something that was perhaps unexpected when his father, in the waning days of his presidency, issued him a pardon for convictions on federal gun and tax charges.
Prior to Saturday’s gala, Biden had struck a more conventional tone in a statement attributed to him in anticipation of his address. “I’ve always believed democracy isn’t a spectator sport,” Biden’s statement said, before praising political organizers for “knocking on doors, making phone calls and putting in the time nobody sees but everyone benefits from”.