Joe Biden says journalists will flee U.S. if Donald Trump is elected

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President Joe Biden claimed this week that several prominent journalists have told him that they’ll flee the country if Donald Trump wins the upcoming U.S. election.

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During a Bay Area fundraiser Thursday, Biden, 81, spotted former Today show co-anchor Katie Couric and aired the fears he’s heard from some of her colleagues.

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“Two of your former colleagues — not at the same network — personally told me if he wins, they will have to leave the country because he’s threatened to put them in jail,” Biden said, according to a pool report obtained by Deadline.

Biden didn’t identify the reporters, but continued, saying, “(Trump) embraces political violence. No president since the Civil War has done that. Embrace it. Encourage it.”

Biden acknowledged to the crowd gathered at the home of housing developer Robert Klein that he wasn’t “the gift of all presidents,” but took a shot at Trump saying, “I’m sure as hell better than the last guy.”

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The contrast between the two is stark, with Biden lashing out at the former president for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in which thousands of Trump’s supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol to try and overthrow the 2020 election.

“He calls them patriots, saying if he gets elected he’s going to pardon them,” Biden said. “They killed cops. They killed people.”

Meanwhile, Trump — who has been personally charged with 91 criminal offences in four criminal cases, convicted of fraud and found guilty of defamation — continues to ratchet up his inflammatory language against voters who oppose him politically by likening them to the foreign enemies that the United States fought in the Second World War.

“Our country was at war with the enemy, and they wanted to extinguish our way of life forever,” Trump said in a speech on Thursday to the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville. He added: “This time, the greatest threat is not from the outside of our country, I really believe this. It’s the people from within our country that are more dangerous. They’re very sick people.”

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As the audience cheered, and Trump went on to describe his cause as a holy war, adding: “To achieve victory in this fight, just like in the battles of the past, we still need the hand of our Lord.”

Trump also vowed to protect Christianity in America from leftists who want “to tear down crosses.”

“They want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags,” Trump added. “But no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear to you.”

He went on to label any person of faith who votes for a Democrat as “crazy.”

“You cannot let people vote for these people, you cannot let people vote for the Democrats,” he said.

Trump has all but wrapped up the Republican nomination, but his last remaining rival Nikki Haley has vowed to stay in the race warning voters that the 77-year-old is at risk of developing dementia.

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“We’ve all seen them fumble their words and get confused about world leaders,” she said Tuesday at a campaign stop in Greenville, South Carolina.

“That’s not who you want in the Oval Office when Russia launches a nuclear weapon at our satellites or China shuts down our electricity grid,” Haley said. “We’re talking about the most demanding job in human history. You don’t give it to someone who’s at risk of dementia.”

Biden holds a slight lead over Trump in the latest U.S. polling, but in the run up to the election, voters have expressed concerns over the age of both candidates.

A new Quinnipiac University poll found 67% of voters said Biden is too old to be an effective president for another term — compared with 57% who said the same of Trump.

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X: @markhdaniell

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