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CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — President Joe Biden tore into his predecessor on Tuesday, suggesting that global leaders are terrified of what Donald Trump 's return to the White House could do to democratic rule around the world.
“Every international meeting I attend,” Biden said, specifically referencing his whirlwind trip to Germany last week, “They pull me aside — one leader after the other, quietly — and say, ‘Joe, he can’t win.’ My democracy is at stake.”
His voice rising, Biden then asked if “America walks away, who leads the world? Who? Name me a country.”
The comments came during what was supposed to be a rather staid speech on health care in New Hampshire. They were a dose of unfiltered politics at an event otherwise focused on Biden’s policy legacy with the race to replace him just two weeks from concluding. And they made clear that the president also sees not having Trump succeed him as an important piece of how he might go down in history.
After the speech, Biden went to a campaign office to support New Hampshire Democratic candidates and continued his broadsides against Trump, even saying at one point, “We’ve got to lock him up.” Some supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris — who replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in July — have yelled that during her rallies, though such chants actually have their origin with Trump supporters demanding jail time for his 2016 opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Biden evoking it drew applause from those assembled at the campaign office, but Biden quickly added: "Politically lock him up. Lock him out, that's what we have to do."
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Biden “just admitted the truth: he and Kamala’s plan all along has been to politically persecute their opponent President Trump because they can’t beat him fair and square.”
Biden didn't mention Harris much during his comments, though he noted that she'd been endorsed by some high-profile Republicans. That includes former Rep. Liz Cheney, the GOP's onetime No. 3 in the House and daughter of ex-Vice President Dick Cheney. Instead, Biden continued to focus on Trump, slamming him for being proud about being friends with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and joking that Trump “believes in the free press like I believe I can climb Mt. Everest.”
He said Trump and supporters of his “Make America Great Again” movement have “anti-democratic” attitudes toward the way the Constitution functions and “virtually no regard” for it.
“Think about what happens if Donald Trump were to win this election," Biden said, adding, “He’s not joking about it, he’s deadly earnest” and "It’s a serious, serious problem."
“We must win," Biden said.
Biden was in New Hampshire's capital of Concord with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the last candidate he beat to win the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. They both appeared at Concord Community College to trumpet the Department of Health and Human Services finding that almost 1.5 million Medicare enrollees saved nearly $1 billion on prescription drugs during the first half of the year.
Much of those savings came as a result of a cap on out-of-pocket drug costs created by the sweeping climate and health care law that the Biden administration helped carry through Congress in 2022. It put an annual maximum of $3,500 that recipients of Medicare, the government's health insurance coverage plans for seniors, pay for their prescriptions while making recommended vaccines for older Americans, like immunization for shingles, free.
Biden said that seniors aren't the only ones benefitting from the savings: “It's also saving taxpayers billions of dollars."
Next year, the drug cost cap for Medicare recipients falls to $2,000 per year, which will save some of the sickest Americans more. But the change has come at a price for others – it’s contributed to rising drug plan premiums that the government has tried to keep down by paying insurers billions of dollars from the Medicare trust fund. Still, some insurers have raised plan prices significantly – or pulled plans from markets.
The legislation is expected to deliver major savings in other ways, though, for taxpayers and Medicare enrollees in the long term.
For the first time ever, the federal government will negotiate the price of 10 of Medicare’s costliest drugs. The negotiated list prices, announced in August, will take effect in 2026. Taxpayers spend more than $50 billion yearly on the 10 drugs, which include popular blood thinners Xarelto and Eliquis and diabetes drugs Jardiance and Januvia.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicare drug pricing negotiations will save taxpayers $3.7 billion in the first year.
But his championing of lower drug prices was overshadowed by the warnings Biden offered about Trump.
“No president has ever been like this guy. He’s a genuine threat to our democracy.”
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Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Amanda Seitz and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.