The former US president says his successor is attempting to ‘jail his leading political opponent’
Former US President Donald Trump told supporters on Saturday that his White House successor, Joe Biden, is employing “Stalinist” tactics to stamp out his political opponents ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
In his first public comments since the unsealing of a 37-count indictment on charges of mishandling classified government secrets on Friday, Trump told a crowd of Republican state party delegates and guests in Columbus, Georgia that the claims against him were “a political hit job.”
“Biden is trying to jail his leading political opponent,” a defiant Trump said during an 84-minute speech. “Just like they [did]in Stalinist Russia or in Communist China.”
Trump, who was criminally indicted in April in New York on campaign finance charges, added that “lawless partisan prosecutors” appear to issue him with a subpoena “every time I fly over a blue state.”
The charges unsealed by special prosecutor Jack Smith in Miami allege that Trump was complicit in the illegal retention of classified national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. It is also claimed in the charges that Trump lied to investigators. Lawyers representing Trump resigned a day after he was notified of the federal indictment.
The event in Georgia, which took place without the presence of the state’s Republican governor and frequent Trump critic Brian Kemp, also saw the ex-president repeatedly attack Biden for what he said were ineffective economic policies. He also said he believed Biden’s weakness on the world stage proved that the US is “a nation in decline.”
“If you took the worst five presidents in the history of the United States and added them up,” Trump calculated, “they would not have done near the destruction to our country as Joe Biden.”
Trump remains the GOP frontrunner to oppose Biden in the 2024 presidential election in spite of deepening legal issues. He also faces probes into his role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol and an investigation – coincidentally in Georgia – related to claims that he pressured officials in the state to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election.
And Trump, who also told Politico that he’ll “never leave” his campaign for president regardless of any charges against him, made clear one element of his platform for 2024. “We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, and we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country,” he vowed.
