Joe Biden is ready, willing and able to handle a second term as president, his wife insisted Friday — despite the 81-year-old chief executive freezing up during a Juneteenth celebration and wandering away from G7 leaders at a summit in Italy this week.
“We can’t wake up on November 6 like we did in 2016 terrified of the future ahead of us,” Jill Biden told a crowd of seniors at a Reno, Nevada, pep rally.
“This election is about the character of the person leading our country,” the first lady said.
An estimated 600,000 seniors live in Nevada, nearly one-third of the 1.9 million eligible voters in the Silver State.
Recent polls have shown former President Donald Trump, 78, up by five points over Joe Biden, who won the state in 2020.
The first lady, who jetted back from Europe to catch the end of son Hunter Biden’s felony gun charge trial earlier this week, kicked off the “Seniors for Biden-Harris” whistlestop tour with events in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Duluth, Minnesota, Thursday.
The campaign is hoping bingo and pickleball events, rallies and phone banks will send the older voting demographic to the polls in support of a candidate who would be 86 by the end of a second consecutive term.
“Joe Biden is a healthy, wise, 81-year-old, ready and willing to get to work every day to make our future better,” Jill Biden, 73, told the Reno audience, echoing similar stump speech remarks in Duluth.
She said, “Joe isn’t just one of the most effective presidents of our lives, in spite of his age, but because of it.”
Jill Biden was introduced to the Nevada crowd by actress/activist Jane Fonda, 86, who shrieked that presumptive GOP nominee Trump “is a convicted felon who wouldn’t even qualify for a security clearance for God’s sakes, we absolutely cannot get him again.”
Fonda, derided by many for her Vietnam War visit to Hanoi and support for communist troops, said she “got scared” while flying into Nevada’s second-largest city.
“Houses are so exposed to just unrelenting sun,” she declared.
“There’s no tree protection. I didn’t see any solar panels on any homes. … People who work outside are going to die because it’s going to be above 110 [degrees].”
Fonda then claimed Trump “invited all the executives of the big oil companies and he sat down and looked them straight in the eye and he said, ‘If you give me $1 billion, I will kill all the regulations, the environmental regulations that you don’t like, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.’”
The actress, who rose to fame in the prehistoric spoof “Barbarella,” offered no substantiation for the claim.
While the Reno audience appeared enthusiastic in supporting the comments of Fonda and Biden, not every group of seniors embraced the re-election effort.
“While we respect Dr. Jill Biden’s support for her husband, it is concerning to see President Joe Biden continually placed in high-pressure public situations that highlight his vulnerabilities. This, in our view, borders on elder abuse,” said Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens, or AMAC, a conservative-leaning seniors group.
Weber said, “We firmly believe that the ability to lead effectively is not determined by age but by mental acuity, experience, and judgment. It is crucial for any leader, especially the President of the United States, to possess the mental sharpness necessary to navigate the complexities and demands of the office.”
