Trump ridicules Biden for ‘pause’ gaffe, conducts survey for best presidential nickname

Former President Donald Trump mocked President Joe Biden and took a straw poll on the best nickname for his successor on Wednesday at a campaign rally.

At the Waukesha County Expo Center in Wisconsin, Trump riffed on Biden’s recent teleprompter blunder, when he appeared to read off the instructions for how he should act.

“Isn’t it nice to have a president who doesn’t need a teleprompter — not that he can read it anyway, he can’t read it,” Trump said. “Now think if I read my teleprompter and I’m going, ‘Well, let’s see, because of the weakness in the economy, I’d like to apologize — pause. Pause. Pause,’” he added mockingly, to laughter from the audience.

“What was that?” he continued. “That’s unbelievable. Pause. You know, I was watching it, I said, ‘That was weird.’ They actually don’t have ‘pause’ in my teleprompter, you know. They have a blank space, like, you see if there’s a response. If there’s no response, you just keep going, you don’t have ‘pause.’”

He went on to call himself the “king of nicknames” but said he couldn’t bring up most of them, as their targets are now friends, likely referring to targets such as Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).

“You know, I can’t really bring them back,” he said of the nicknames of his rivals-turned-friends. “I bring back bad memories.”

Trump decided to conduct an impromptu poll of what the best nickname for Biden was, between “Sleepy Joe” and “Crooked Joe.”

“What do you like better, Crooked Joe or Sleepy Joe?” he asked the crowd. “They’re both accurate. What do you like better?”

After contradictory answers from the audience, Trump said he would put it to an impromptu vote, with the noise level after each deciding the best.

“We’ll go sleepy first, Sleepy Joe,” he said, to some muted cheers from different parts of the crowd.

“Crooked Joe,” Trump said, to uproarious cheers from the crowd.

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“That Crooked Joe is a bad guy,” he said. “I thought it was going to be a lot closer than that, wow.”

Trump then stopped himself after briefly bashing pollsters, praising them because he is “leading in all the polls.”