Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren both ripped into Donald Trump as a “racist” on Thursday — but not before Biden tipped his hand for his official endorsement, saying “God willing,” Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States.

Biden made the comments, delivered in an offhand tangent, shortly after meeting with Bernie Sanders at his Naval Observatory home. Warren had given her endorsement of Clinton in an appearance on MSNBC.


And of course, both followed President Barack Obama’s official endorsement of Clinton released earlier in the day.

But first, they both ripped into Trump as a dangerous, obnoxious man whose presence in the Oval Office threatened to undermine the Constitution and the very fabric of America, using their forum at the American Constitution Society convention to build their case around Trump’s attacks on the supposed bias of Gonzalo Curiel, the judge in several class-actions lawsuits over Trump University, because of his Mexican ancestry.

Trump, Biden said, “cannot be trusted to respect the independence of the judiciary as a president.” Either he doesn’t understand or doesn’t care, Biden said, the danger of what he’s sowing with his comments, which the vice president said tilt toward authoritarianism and tyranny.

“These are words in my view of one who would defy the courts if they ruled against him as president,” Biden said, but, “It's not the racism that worries me. We've dealt with racists before. It's the potential impact on the court."

But the wider blistering attack came from Warren, who also called Trump a disgrace and a shame on the country.

But her favorite attack: “thin-skinned.”

Three times she threw that into an intense, rip-roaring attack on the Republican presidential nominee, taking the assault on him off Twitter and to podium just before her endorsement of Hillary Clinton hit the air.

Speaking a few blocks from the White House, the Massachusetts senator used the topic of held-up judicial nominations — from the Supreme Court down to district court judges — to wrap together an attack on Trump, Republicans in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan.

First, she called Trump “a thin-skinned racist bully,” going farther than most Democrats have in using the word “racist” explicitly.

A few minutes later, she called him “a loud, nasty thin-skinned fraud who has never risked anything for anyone and who serves no one but himself.”

Then as she wrapped up: “A small, insecure thin-skinned wannabe tyrant."

She even pulled out a McConnell impression at one point, doing a croaky voice as she mimicked the Senate leader’s oblique and understated criticism of Trump’s attack on Curiel, the federal judge.

She mocked McConnell for excusing Trump by saying he’s a different kind of candidate.

On the contrary, Warren said Trump is the kind of candidate Republicans have been putting up for years, committed to the same ideas they’ve been pushing in Congress that’s led to lockstep opposition to President Barack Obama’s judicial appointments.

“Trump isn't a different kind of candidate. He's a Mitch McConnell kind of candidate,” she said.

Warren blamed the McConnell-led holdup over putting Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court as about “extremist Republicans who reject the legitimacy of President Obama. … It is outrageous and it is up to us to fight back.”

She also attacked Ryan for not opposing the blockade on judicial confirmations. That mentality, she said, is also evident in Trump’s attacks on judges, both by saying that a Muslim judge might not be able to be impartial with him — “a disgusting theory that Trump’s own bigotry compromises the judge’s neutrality” — and by trying to hold himself to a different standard over the ongoing Trump University controversy.

“You shame yourself and you shame this great country,” Warren said. "You, Donald Trump, are a total disgrace."

View Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren endorse Hillary Clinton Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren endorse Hillary Clinton secretly on Thursday.

“I don’t think the Framers envisioned a presidential candidate accusing a judge of being incapable of reaching a fair decision because of his ethnic descent,” Biden said later in the evening, also repeatedly laying into Trump by name.

Biden said that he’s talked to 17 Republican senators and they’ve told him privately, "Joe, I know you're right." He said that’s made him feel that a hearing for Garland is "still possible” — and that if they get the hearing, they’ll get Garland on the bench. Holding him up, Biden said, is “unprecedented dysfunction that the Senate is literally spreading to the judicial branch.”

Biden's earlier Clinton comment was not expected; he's expected to issue a formal endorsement of the former secretary state.