Donald Trump Accuses Joe Biden Of Using ‘Super Predator,’ A Term Infamously Uttered By Hillary Clinton
In a Twitter message posted on Friday, President Donald Trump accused his general election opponent Joe Biden of using the term “super predator” to describe African American criminals.
“Biden made another big mistake. He totally mixed up two Crime Bills. Didn’t have a clue (as usual!),” Trump tweeted, reacting to the Democratic nominee’s Thursday night town hall.
“Also, he freely used the term SUPER PREDATOR!!!”
As CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale pointed out in a tweet, “there is no record of Biden using that phrase.”
In fact, the racially charged words were uttered and popularized by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
According to a fact-check from NBC News, while campaigning for the 1994 crime bill as first lady, Clinton infamously attached the super predator label to African American gang members.
As the fact-check noted, although the former Delaware senator has not used the exact same phrase, he has described criminals as “predators.”
Per The Intercept, during an address to the National Association of Attorneys General conference in 1998, Biden, who played a key role in the passage of the controversial 1994 bill, railed against “predators” on American streets.
“There’s about 100,000 of them, if you want to be rhetorically extreme about it, who are the predators. There are 100,000 real bad apples out there,” he said at the time.
In 2016, Trump repeatedly slammed Clinton for popularizing the phrase super predator. Notably, during a campaign event, Black Lives Matter activists confronted Clinton over the issue, demanding an apology.
In 1996, Biden co-authored the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, which was meant to, by his own admission, try children as adults.
As the publication pointed out, this was not out of the ordinary for Biden, then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who was known for his tough-on-crime stances.
In an apparent attempt to appeal to the African American community, Trump has repeatedly made similar accusations against Biden, claiming that the Democrat spent decades championing racist policies that harmed people of color.
“Super Predator was the term associated with the 1994 Crime Bill that Sleepy Joe Biden was so heavily involved in passing. That was a dark period in American History, but has Sleepy Joe apologized? No!” he wrote in a 2019 tweet.
According to Gallup, research has shown that Clinton lacked support among African Americans, which hurt her in the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Overall, Black turnout dropped from 67 percent in 2012 to 60 percent in 2016.
Polling averages suggest that Biden is leading Trump among Black voters by as much as 85 percentage points, but turnout could, once again, determine the outcome of the election.
Still, Biden is considered the favorite to win the presidency. The latest CNN poll put him 16 percentage points ahead of Trump nationwide.
