Biden: Trump uses racial wounds for political gain

WASHINGTON — The clash between President Donald Trump and his critics over civil unrest sweeping the country intensified Tuesday, as Joe Biden bluntly accused him of being “more interested in serving the passions of his base than the needs of the people,” and even some Republicans leveled rare criticism of their party leader.

Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, laced into the president in searing terms that signaled a new willingness to step out from pandemic-mandated quarantine to be a more forceful leader of the opposition party.

Biden likened Trump to Southern segregationists of the 1960s and accused him of exploiting national divisions for political gain and fanning “the flames of hate.”

He criticized Trump for staging a “photo op” in front of a church across the street from the White House on Monday evening after police and National Guard units cleared the way by using force against peaceful protesters.

“The president is more interested in power than in principle,” Biden said. Noting that Trump carried a Bible before cameras, Biden said, “I just wish he opened it once in a while instead of brandishing it.”

For Trump, he said, “narcissism has become more important than the nation’s well-being that he leads.”

The widely publicized speech at Philadelphia City Hall, carried live by cable networks, was the former vice president’s first outside his Delaware home since mid-March when his campaign was sidelined by the COVID19 pandemic.

The Trump campaign responded by turning Biden’s criticism of Trump back on him. Katrina Pierson, a senior Trump campaign adviser, accused Biden of making the “crass political calculation that unrest in America is a benefit to his candidacy.” She said he had a history of “cozying up to notorious racists in the Senate,” an apparent reference to legislative work Biden did with southern Republicans like Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.