Joe Biden accused President Donald Trump of stoking violence after a week of deadly unrest catapulted law and order to the top of the political agenda barely two months before the US election.
The stakes for Biden’s speech in Pittsburgh, in the swing state of Pennsylvania, could not have been higher a day before Trump heads to the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, to deliver his dueling vision on the upheaval.
Emerging from months of Covid-19 travel restrictions, Biden finds himself suddenly on the defensive, mocked by Trump as weak in the face of events combining leftist anti-racism protests, riots, deadly shootings and right-wing vigilante actions in Kenosha and in Portland, Oregon.
With Trump exalting in the shift of debate from his widely panned handling of the coronavirus pandemic to his favored theme of crime, Biden risks losing the momentum that has put him ahead in the polls for the November 3 vote.
But the 77-year-old Democrat punched back, branding Trump’s presidency “a toxic presence in our nation.”
“Fires are burning and we have a president who fans the flames rather than fighting the flames,” Biden said.
“The incumbent president is incapable of telling us the truth, incapable of facing the facts and incapable of healing.”
While Trump has spent much of the past week warning voters they “won’t be safe” in Biden’s America, the Democrat sought to turn tables on the Republican in his 22-minute speech — delivered in a mostly empty hall due to coronavirus concerns — with the question: “Do you really feel safer under Donald Trump?”
Trump “can’t stop the violence, because for years he has fomented it,” Biden charged.
Trump “may believe mouthing the words ‘law and order’ makes him strong, but his failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows you how weak he is.”
Biden, who has been accused by Republicans of insufficiently denouncing violence by leftist anti-racism protesters, tried to set this to rest.
“Looting is not protesting, setting fires is not protesting,” he said. “None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple, and those who do it should be prosecuted.”
At a White House Press conference, Trump still complained that Biden “mostly seemed to blame the police
and law enforcement,” not leftist radicals.