President Joe Biden was all of us last night during his CNN town hall in Milwaukee when he made clear that he is tired of talking about the former commander-in-chief.
“For four years, all that’s been in the news is Trump. The next four years, I want to make sure all the news is the American people. I’m tired of talking about Trump,” Biden said, responding to a question about Donald Trump being acquitted by the Senate in his second impeachment.
The president’s efforts to move on from Trump were noticeable; at one point, Biden referred to him as “the former guy.” Publicly, the Biden administration has diligently worked to lessen mentions of his name in news cycles, referring instead to “the previous administration.”
Biden addressed the Trump administration’s inept handling of the coronavirus vaccine rollout during Tuesday’s town hall, where he said this administration “inherited a circumstance” in which “there weren’t many vaccinators… (and) there was very little federal guidance” in helping get more Americans inoculated against the deadly COVID-19.
Significantly, the president expressed that he is working to move the nation’s teachers further up the priority list for vaccination. That point has been a major issue of contention from educators and their unions across the country.
“You had the former guy saying that, ‘Well, you know, we’re just going to open things up, and that’s all we need to do.’ We said, ‘No, you’ve got to deal with the disease before you deal with getting the economy going,'” Biden said. “The fact is that now, the economy has to be dealt with.”
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Biden was on stage in front of a socially-distanced, mask-wearing audience, making his pitch for the passage of a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package directly to the people. He also offered insight into when he thinks the country will get back to “normal.”
He indicated it was important that he not over-promise to Americans what he may not be able to deliver, but he did offer an estimate: “A year from now.”
“I think that there will be significantly fewer people having to be socially distanced, have to wear a mask,” said the president. “But we don’t know.”
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Biden shut down talk of canceling $50,000 in student debt via executive action, as was proposed in a resolution earlier this month by key Democrats: “I will not make that happen.”
“I understand the impact of debt, and it can be debilitating,” he told an audience member. “I am prepared to write off the $10,000 debt but not $50 [thousand], because I don’t think I have the authority to do it.” He maintained he wanted community college to be free and students from families with annual incomes less than $125,000 to be able to attend state schools without paying.
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A question about his plans to address white supremacy in the nation got Biden to declare “white supremacists are the greatest domestic terror threat in America.”
He called the matter “complex, it’s wide-ranging, and it’s real.”
“I would make sure that my Justice Department and the Civil Rights Division is focused heavily on those very folks, and I would make sure that we, in fact, focus on how to deal with the rise of white supremacy,” Biden said, including in the military and police departments.
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