Not even the death of Pope Francis could bring President Donald Trump to make nice and ride with former President Joe Biden.
Sitting President George W. Bush rode with former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton on Air Force One to the funeral Mass of Pope John Paul II’s in 2005. Yet when Trump was told that Biden would also be attending the Saturday ceremony, he didn’t give his political rival much thought.
“Oh he is? I didn’t know,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, The Daily Mail reported. Trump said that a meeting with Biden during the trip to Italy was “not high on my list.”
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“It’s really not,” he added.
The MAGA president doubled down on that sentiment during the ceremony as he sat with First Lady Melania Trump and ignored Biden and former First Lady Jill Biden—despite them clearly being within his line of sight, The Daily Mail reported.
Yet even after his sweeping second election win, Trump has kept Biden front and center as a scapegoat. The New York Times reported that Trump mentioned Biden more than 300 times in the first 50 days of his presidency, regularly blaming him for manufactured chaos at the border and attacking him as “the worst president in American history.”
However, Trump did make time to sit down with political frenemy Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, reported NYT.
“They are very close to a deal,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday as he landed in Rome. “The two sides should now meet, at very high levels, to ‘finish it off.’”
