The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Protests are at center of Biden-Trump clash
Sharp division flares over how to react to violence.
The battle over who can keep Americans safe after recent deadly protests emerged Monday as the sharpest dividing line for the presidential campaign’s final weeks as Joe Biden condemned the violence and President Donald Trump defended a supporter accused of fatally shooting two men.
While the president blamed Biden, his Democratic foe, for siding with “anarchists,” Biden, in his most direct attacks yet, accused Trump of causing the divisions that have ignited the violence. He delivered an uncharacteristically blistering speech and distanced himself from radical forces involved in altercations.
Biden said of Trump, “He doesn’t want to shed light, he wants to generate heat, and he’s stoking violence in our cities. He can’t stop the violence because for years he’s fomented it.”
Trump blames radical troublemakers stirred up and backed by Biden. But when he was asked about one of his own supporters who was charged with killing two men during the mayhem in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he declined to denounce the killings and suggested that 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense.
After a confrontation in which he shot one man, police say, Rittenhouse was chased by two others. The teenager, who was illegally carrying the firearm, was charged with homicide after killing two people and injuring a third.
“That was an interesting situation,” said Trump. “He was trying to get away from them, looks like, and he fell, and then they very violently attacked him. He was in very big trouble. He probably would’ve been killed.”
Trump’s refusal to condemn the shootings could add to tensions and the reaction in Kenosha when he visits today.
Trump said his appearance could “increase enthusiasm” in Wisconsin, which is a hotly contested battleground state in the presidential race.
Biden saw Trump’s impact far differently, accusing the president of “poisoning” the nation’s values.
In Pittsburgh, the former vice president also tried to refocus the race on what has been its defining theme — Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic that has left more than 180,000 Americans dead — after a multi-day onslaught by the president’s team to make the campaign about the violence rattling American cities.
Biden himself has largely remained near his home in Delaware to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, but he stepped out in a new phase of his campaign on Monday, with a speech in Pittsburgh and a brief stop at a local firehouse.
Trump and his campaign team have seized upon the recent unrest in Portland and Kenosha, leaning hard into a defense of law and order while suggesting that Biden is powerless to stop extremists.
Biden rejected the charge, firmly decrying the clashes.
Set aside on Monday were his lofty appeals about the “soul of the nation,” a staple of his usual stump speech, replaced by an urgent call for action and his fierce accusation that Trump was a “toxic presence in this nation for four years” who was “poisoning the values this nation has always held dear, poisoning our very democracy.”
The president and his team continued to hammer away on what they believe is a powerful electoral argument, contending that Biden is in thrall to leftist forces and emphasizing chaotic protest images they believe could send worried suburban and senior voters back to Trump’s column.
“Just watched what Biden had to say,” Trump tweeted soon after the former vice president concluded his remarks in Pittsburgh. “To me, he’s blaming the Police far more than he’s blaming the Rioters, Anarchists, Agitators, and Looters, which he could never blame or he would lose the Radical Left Bernie supports!”