President Joe Biden said Donald Trump’s “phony populism” had hurt the former GOP president’s political party and left Senate Republicans reluctant to back a Jan. 6 commission to investigate the Capitol riot.
“The Republican Party is vastly diminished in numbers … [its] leadership … fractured. And the Trump wing of the party is the bulk of the party, but it makes up a significant minority of the American people,” Biden told reporters during a press conference in Belgium, adding that he “didn’t want to get into the statistics.”
“You know, that old phrase of [Benjamin] Disraeli’s — ‘There’s three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,’” the president said.
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Senate Republicans “who know better” have been reluctant to pursue a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters and voiced “shock and surprise” at what he said was the “consequence of President Trump’s phony populism,” he added. “So many of my Republican colleagues in the Senate, who I know know better, have been reluctant to take on, for example, an investigation because they are worried about being primaried.”
“At the end of the day, we’ve been through periods like this in American history before, where there has been this reluctance to take a chance on your reelection because of the nature of your party’s politics at the moment,” Biden said. “I think this has not been easily passed.”
The president, in Brussels to meet with NATO allies, was asked by a reporter what he told European leaders rattled by the Jan. 6 violence.
“They, like I do, believe the American people are not going to sustain that kind of behavior,” Biden said.
Responding to a question of what this meant for future U.S. leadership, Biden said, “I’m not making any promises to anyone that I don’t believe are overwhelmingly likely to be kept.”
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“I guess that old expression, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. When I said I was going to deal with beating the virus … it wasn’t me, I just knew the American people,” he said, touting his administration’s vaccination efforts. “And look how rapidly we moved.”
