President Joe Biden appeared to claim victory over Medicare during Thursday night’s debate against former President Donald Trump.
Biden boasted that he "finally beat Medicare" during a rambling remark defending his proposal to raise taxes on billionaires, which he said would raise $500 billion over the next 10 years and would enable the federal government to pay for health care initiatives.
"We have 1,000 trillionaires in America, I mean billionaires in America," Biden said. "And what’s happening, they’re in a situation where they pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent, 25 percent, either one of those numbers, we’d raise $500 million—billion dollars I should say—in a ten year period. We’d be able to wipe out his debt, we’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do, child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system."
The octogenarian president appeared to lose his train of thought as he charged forward.
"Making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, with the COVID," Biden said. "Excuse me. With dealing with everything we have to do with, look, if we finally beat Medicare."
Trump quickly capitalized on Biden’s verbal malfunction.
"Well, he’s right. He did beat Medicare," Trump said. "He beat it to death. He’s destroying Medicare."
Minutes before the debate started, the Biden campaign announced the sale of "Dark Brandon’s Secret Sauce," a $4.60 can of water the campaign said the president consumed to boost his performance on the debate stage.
"I don’t know what they’ve got in these performance enhancers, but I’m feeling pretty jacked up," Biden posted on his X account.
Midway through the debate, sources close to Biden approached reporters to claim the president "has a cold," according to NBC News reporter Kelly O’Donnell.