During a Sunday appearance on Fox News, President Donald Trump ripped into Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden , The Washington Examiner reported.
Speaking with Sunday Morning Futures anchor Maria Bartiromo, Trump accused his opponent of misleading voters and changing his positions on important issues.
“He [Biden] said for a year there would be no fracking, and you heard that many times, he couldn’t say it any stronger. Then all of a sudden he said there’s going to be fracking,” Trump began.
He argued that Biden realized that opposition to the controversial practice could cost him states like Pennsylvania, Texas and Oklahoma, and then changed his position.
“Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, many, many states, Ohio, you have to frack. You have to frack. And if they don’t frack, energy’s going to go through the roof,” Trump said.
The commander-in-chief suggested that his opponent is flip-flopping because he is trying to woo progressives and moderates at the same time.
He said that Biden is working on climate change legislation with left-leaning Democrats like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, while trying to appeal to centrist voters.
As Snopes reported, during one of the Democratic primary debates earlier this year, Biden suggested that he was in favor of banning fracking.
His campaign later clarified the comments, saying that the former vice president actually meant to say that he wants to end new gas and oil production on federal lands and not ban the environment-destroying practice altogether.
Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, has explicitly said that she is in favor of a full ban. However, the official Biden-Harris platform does not call for that.
After taking aim at Biden’s environmental policies, Trump slammed the news media for failing to hold the Democrat accountable, arguing that Republicans would not receive the same treatment.
“Everything he says is a lie, and he gets away with it.”
“No Republican, especially me, but no Republican could get away with what he does,” he added.
Elsewhere in the interview, Trump described Biden as “weak,” saying that the former Delaware senator is controlled by “the killers of his party.”
The commander-in-chief and his allies have previously made similar claims, arguing that the Democratic Party has been taken over by progressives.
In an August advertisement, for instance, the Trump campaign accused Biden of embracing the “radical left.” The ad quoted Sanders, who said in an interview that once-fringe ideas are now considered mainstream.
These attacks do not seem to be working, since Biden has only increased his polling lead. The latest CNN survey put him 16 percentage points ahead of Trump nationwide.