Biden puts two feet in the ring as Trump wobbles

Joe Biden's do-no-harm campaign is taking a sharper edge as his race with President Donald Trump enters the home stretch and the incumbent, now a week removed from the Republican convention's sugar high, is again lashing out in response to a new series of self-made controversies.

On the eve of Labor Day weekend, Biden, in his second press conference of the week, reacted furiously to a report that Trump, in private conversations, described American soldiers killed in combat as "suckers." Biden called the remarks "absolutely damnable" and called on the President, if the story's details are true, to apologize to the families of US military veterans and war dead.

The alleged comments, as first recounted in The Atlantic on Thursday, have been met with a frenzied onslaught of denials from the White House and Trump personally, who has called the report a "hoax." But their rush to undermine the story, which has not been independently verified by CNN, underscores the political peril Trump sees ahead -- and, if nothing else, its potential to detract from their efforts to turn this election into a partisan choice and not simply a referendum on his first four years.

Biden made the issue -- which could dampen Trump's support with military families and veterans -- personal during a back-and-forth with reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, on Friday, recalling the record of his late son, Beau.

"My son was an assistant US attorney and he volunteered to go to Kosovo, when the war was going on, as a civilian, he wasn't a 'sucker,'" Biden said, his face stern as he hammered on the offending term. "When my son volunteered and joined the United States military as the Attorney General (of Delaware), he went to Iraq for a year, won the Bronze Star and other commendations, he wasn't a 'sucker.'"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-puts-two-feet-in-the-ring-as-trump-wobbles/ar-BB18JKIt?li=BB141NW3&ocid=DELLDHP