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There was a lot in Biden’s interview with the Associated Press, which was in and of itself notable for happening at all, since the president doesn’t sit down with reporters that often.
Biden retold the story of how the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and then-president Trump’s response to it, spurred him to jump into the 2020 race:
I made a commitment and I think I can say that I’ve never broken, if I make a commitment. I wasn’t going to run again, this time. I mean for real. I was not going to run. I just lost my son, I was teaching at Penn, I liked it, until all those guys came, come out of the woods …
AP: Charlottesville.
Zero evidence of that. Zero evidence of that, number one. Number two, we’ve reduced the deficit by $350 billion last year. We reduced the deficit by a trillion, 700 billion this year. We grow the economy. Today, today, we have more people employed than, in a long, long time and we gained another 8.6 million jobs. And guess what? We still have hundreds of thousands of job openings.
Think about what it’s like for the graduating classes of the last three years. No proms. No graduation. No, no, none of the things that celebrate who we are. Think about it across the board. How isolated we’ve become. How separated we’ve become. Even practical questions like, you know, can you go out on a date? I mean (inaudible) the normal socialization, how does that take place? There’s overwhelming evidence it’s had a profound impact on the psyche of parents, children, across the board. And we lost a million people.
And nine for every, according to a study, of those million people, nine significant family or close friends were left alive after they’re gone.