A VISIT TO VICTIM
Joe talks with Blake and fam, vows to change how cops treat minorities
Joe Biden spoke with Jacob Blake over the phone and met with his family while visiting Kenosha, Wisc., on Thursday in an attempt to draw a sharp contrast with President Trump, who barnstormed through the violence-ravaged city earlier this week without even mentioning the Black man’s name.
The Democratic presidential candidate’s first stop upon landing at an airport in Milwaukee was to sit down privately with the father, sisters, brother and mother of Blake, who was shot seven times in the back by a white Kenosha officer on Aug. 23 in front of his three young children.
Blake, who survived the shooting but is paralyzed from the waist down, joined the meeting from his hospital bed via phone, according to his attorney, Ben Crump, who was also inin attendance.
“They talked about changing the disparate treatment of minorities in police interactions, the impact of selecting Kamala Harris as a Black woman as his running mate, and Vice President Biden’s plans for change,” Crump said in a statement. “Jacob Jr. shared about the pain he is enduring, and the vice president commiserated.”
“It was very obvious that Vice President Biden cared, as he extended to Jacob Jr. a sense of humanity, treating him as a person worthy of consideration and prayer,” Crump added.
After the meeting, Biden traveled on to Blake’s hometown of Kenosha, where he attended a community meeting at a local church.
Speaking before a smalll group of mask-wearing Kenosha residents and local leaders, the former vice president recalled his time as a young public defender in Delaware and confessed that he “made a mistake about something” at the time.
“I thought you could defeat hate,” he said. “Hate only hides. When someone in authority breathes oxygen under that rock, it legitimizes folks to come out from under the rocks.”
In a throwback to his campaign announcement, Biden said he only began thinking of running for president because of Trump’s widely-reviled reaction to the deadly violence that erupted at the white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
“He said there’s very fine people on both sides,” Biden said. “No president has said
anything like that … It legitimizes the dark side of human nature.”
Pivoting away from Trump, Biden said he’s ultimately “optimistic” for the future despite the trifecta of turmoil bearing down on the country, with the coronavirus still killing thousands of Americans every week, an economy in shambles and national unrest over police brutality.
“I think we’ve reached an inflection point in American history,” Biden said. “I honest to God believe we have an enormous opportunity now that the screen, the curtain has been pulled back … to do a lot of really positive things.”
Biden’s upbeat message marked a remarkable change in tone compared to Trump’s visit on Tuesday.
Blake’s relatives refused to meet with Trump as several of them consider him a racist, so, instead, the president huddled with law enforcement officials at a local command center and toured some buildings damaged during recent protests.
Instead of offering sympathy for the Blake family, Trump sought to defend the cop who shot the Black man by suggesting that the officer may have just “choked.”
The president also blamed the violence that has rocked the city since Blake’s shooting squarely on Democrats and “anarchists,” even though the chaos in Kenosha reached its peak last week, when a 17-yearold Trump supporter from Illinois shot two protesters to death and wounded another.
With just two months to go until Election Day, Biden’s Kenosha visit marked his first cross-country campaign trip since the pandemic grounded American life to a halt this spring. Wisconsin is one of several crucial swing states that Biden and Trump are expected to fight tooth and nail over on Nov. 3.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, had asked both Trump and Biden to not visit Kenosha to avoid fanning the flames of unrest in the city.
Kenosha remained largely calm during Biden’s visit, though, with just a handful of his supporters and Black Lives Matter protesters converging near the church he spoke at.
During the president’s visit, by contrast, hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters squared off against nearly as many Trump supporters near the spot where Blake was shot, though violence did not break out.
Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, claimed Biden’s visitvisit waswas inappropriate because, while the president ostensibly went there in his official capacity, the Democratic candidate’s only “injecting politics into a really serious situation that the president helped solve.”
Biden sought to dismiss the idea that he was on a political mission by reiterating that, contrary to Trump’s repeated insistence to the contrary, he’s firmly opposed to rioting, looting and vandalism.
“Protesting is protesting, as my buddy John Lewis used to say,” Biden said, referring to the late Georgia congressman. “But none of it justifies looting, burning or anything else. So regardless how angry you are, if you loot, you burn, you should be held accountable.”