US President Donald Trump has rebuked Democratic 2020 front-runner Joe Biden for the most recent gaffe he made on a campaign trail, saying the former vice president was “not playing with a full deck.”
Biden told supporters in Iowa on Thursday that “poor kids” are “just as talented as white kids” before correcting himself to say “wealthy kids."
“Look, Joe is not playing with a full deck,” Trump told reporters outside the White House on Friday. “He made that comment and I said ‘whoa’.”
"This is not somebody you can have as your president, but if he got the nomination I’d be thrilled," he added.
Trump has in the past asserted without elaborating that the veteran politician is not as mentally and physically sharp as he used to be, referring to Biden as “sleepy Joe.”
The 76-year-old leads in Democratic primary polls and edges Trump in polls of a hypothetical 2020 match-up.
Biden, for his part, has ratcheted up his criticism of Trump in recent days, accusing the president of "fanning the flames" of white supremacy and lacking moral leadership following the deadly shootings in Texas and Ohio that claimed a total of 31 lives.
Early on Sunday morning, a man opened fire at an arts and entertainment district in downtown Dayton, Ohio, killing 9 people and injuring 16 others. The suspect was later shot dead by police.
A day earlier, another shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, left 22 people dead and 24 injured. The gunman, who was arrested, published a “manifesto” before his shooting that had anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric in it. He described the attack as a response to a “Hispanic invasion.”
Trump blames 'racist' Hollywood
Separately on Friday, the US president accused Hollywood of being “racist” and blamed the entertainment industry for pushing "very dangerous" movies on the American society.
"Hollywood, I don’t call them the elites, I think the elites are people they go after in many cases," Trump told reporters at the White House. "But Hollywood is really terrible."
"You talk about racist, Hollywood is racist," he continued. "What they’re doing with the kind of movies they’re putting out is actually very dangerous for our country. What Hollywood is doing is a tremendous disservice to our country."
Trump, who routinely comes under heavy criticism from TV personalities for his policies and for contributing to racism, did not cite any examples for calling Hollywood racist.