Biden compares ‘extreme’ Trump to George Wallace, but once bragged about honor from notorious segregationist
President Biden tore into his predecessor, Donald Trump, during a Monday appearance on MSNBC, comparing him unfavorably to notorious segregationist George Wallace — despite Biden having bragged during his first presidential campaign about receiving an honor from the late Alabama governor.
“I can’t think of a candidate in my lifetime who’s been more extreme,” Biden told “Morning Joe,” adding that the 45th president “makes George Wallace look like a patriot.”
However, Biden has his own unsavory links to Wallace, who infamously vowed in his inaugural address in 1963 that his state would practice “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
On May 1, 1987, the Detroit Free Press published an article headlined “Sunbelt votes key to the White House,” which noted that Biden, then a senator from Delaware making his first run for the presidency, “tells Southerners that the lower half of his state is culturally part of Dixie; he reminds them that former Alabama Gov. George Wallace praised him as one of the outstanding young politicians of America.”
That September, the Philadelphia Inquirer highlighted Biden’s contradictory statements on civil rights, noting that while campaigning in Alabama, “Biden talked of his sympathy for the South, bragged of an award he had received from George Wallace in 1973, and said ‘We (Delawareans) were on the South’s side in the Civil War.’”
Given Biden’s documented penchant for exaggeration, it’s unclear whether he received a physical award from Wallace, who ran for president four consecutive times between 1964 and 1976.
As far back as 1975, however, then-Sen. Biden was holding up Wallace as a model for the Democratic party.
“I think the Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace,” he told the Inquirer that October, “someone who’s not afraid to stand up and offend people, someone who wouldn’t pander but would say what the American people know in their gut is right.”
The Biden-Harris campaign declined to comment Monday when contacted by The Post for this story.
However, when Biden’s past admiration for Wallace, who died in 1998, emerged during the 2020 cycle, the campaign noted that he had gone on the record to say he would support then-President Gerald Ford if Wallace secured the Democratic nomination in 1976.
Biden never had to make that choice, as the nomination went to another Southern governor, Jimmy Carter.
“As a young Senator, Joe Biden declared that if George Wallace — an unhinged, racist maniac — became the presidential nominee of his party, he would support Gerald Ford,” a Biden campaign spokesperson said at the time.
“If more GOP leaders had a scintilla of that same courage in 2016, they wouldn’t be debasing themselves this very minute by defending another unhinged, racist maniac.”
In 2024, polls show Biden struggling to match his previous levels of support among black Americans.
“There’s all this talk about how I don’t have the black support,” Biden said Monday. “Come on, give me a break.”
Over the weekend, a Philadelphia radio station dismissed one of its hosts after she admitted to asking Biden pre-selected questions given to her by the White House during a pre-recorded interview that aired on the July 4 holiday.
