ATLANTA — California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is hitting back at former President Trump’s evidence-free innuendo that President Biden might use performance-enhancing drugs for tonight’s debate.
“It’s beneath contempt. It’s a disgraceful tactic,” Newsom told reporters at the media center adjacent to the debate site.
Newsom added that the gambit was “just typical of somebody who’s a bit unhinged.”
Trump has called for Biden and himself to undergo drug tests in advance of the debate, a request that virtually nobody thought had any serious chance of happening.
At a Saturday campaign rally in Philadelphia, Trump suggested Biden might get “a shot in the ass” before the debate and that he could “come out all jacked up.”
When a reporter asked Newsom about the lack of pushback on such allegations from within the GOP, the California governor segued into a broader indictment of Trump’s Republican colleagues.
“They really drank the Kool-Aid. Speaker Johnson’s just an extension of Trump,” Newsom claimed, going on to reference the collapse of a bipartisan border deal earlier this year after the former president expressed his opposition.
“It’s embarrassing the lack of character and conviction, lack of backbone … It’s a character trait that unfortunately has affected most of the party,” Newsom alleged.
Newsom, who has previously argued that Democrats generally need to be more assertive in making their case, told The Hill he would be in eight states during the week of the July Fourth holiday, making the economic argument for Biden and his party.
But he acknowledged the political damage that had been done to the president by inflation, which reached its highest points in decades in mid-2022 before ebbing.
“The economic record is not comparable” between Biden and Trump, Newsom said. “The challenge is the inflation scars, and none of us are naive about that — the cumulative effect of inflation, looking backwards, peaking at 9.1 percent.
“But the reality today [is] we’ve been taming that, and obviously we have a plan to go forward and tame if further,” Newsom added.