Donald Trump Takes Shots At ‘Corrupt’ Joe Biden On Twitter, Doubles Down On Claim He Wants To Defund Police

President Donald Trump has once again taken aim at former Vice President Joe Biden — the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee — via Twitter, referring to him as “corrupt.” Moreover, Trump doubled down on his claim that Biden has designs on defunding police departments around the country, despite a lack of evidence that his opponent in the 2020 election actually intends to do so.

“Corrupt Joe Biden wants to defund our police,” he wrote on Friday. “He may use different words, but when you look at his pact with Crazy Bernie [Sanders], and other things, that’s what he wants to do. It would destroy America!”

Trump’s tweet — which has generated a significant response on the platform, with more than 14,000 comments and retweets at the time of this report — came on the same day that Fox News aired a preview of an interview with Trump in which Chris Wallace fact-checked Trump on Biden’s alleged desire to defund law enforcement agencies.

During the clip that was shown, Trump referenced the recently-formed Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force charter as proof that the former V.P. wanted to defund police. When Wallace pointed out that the charter made no reference to doing so, Trump demanded to see a copy of the document.

Although the proposed platform does call for a major overhaul of the criminal justice system, including a number of police reforms — the banning of choke holds, racial profiling by officers and the ending of qualified immunity, which would allow the victims of police misconduct and their families to pursue civil action — it does not endorse any means of defunding.

According to Wallace, Trump’s team ultimately found “a lot of things that he objected to that Biden has agreed to, but he couldn’t find any indication — because there isn’t any — that Joe Biden has sought to defund and abolish the police.”

Vice President Mike Pence has made similar claims about Biden, tweeting earlier this month that he “referred to the police at ‘the enemy’ & called for them to be defunded.”

Pence continued: “We want all officers to hear us loud & clear: we are NOT going to defund the police—not now, not ever.”

For his part, Biden has consistently stated that he is not in favor of defunding law enforcement. As relayed by the Associated Press, Biden said on July 8 that police departments don’t need to be defunded, but maintained that they should “meet minimum basic standards of decency.”