‘We must not let our pain destroy us,’ Biden says
Joe Biden on Tuesday excoriated President Donald Trump’s stewardship of a nation convulsed in crisis over issues of race and police brutality, likening Trump’s language to that of southern racists of the 1960s while also warning Americans that “we cannot let our rage consume us.”
In his first formal speech out in public since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the campaign trail in mid-March, Biden delivered perhaps his closest approximation yet of a presidential address to the nation. He emphasized themes of empathy and unity to draw a clear contrast with Trump, who over the last 24 hours threatened to deploy the military nationwide to dominate protesters and told governors they had to deliver “retribution” to demonstrators or else they would look like “a bunch of jerks.”
With Trump determined to cast himself as a self-described
“law and order” president, Biden aimed to appeal to a broader range of the electorate’s concerns, pledging to address economic inequality and racial injustice but also urging the nation to come together at a moment of deep civil unrest.
“Donald Trump has turned this country into a battlefield riven by old resentments and fresh fears,” Biden said, speaking against a backdrop of American flags at Philadelphia’s city hall. “Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be? Is this what we want to pass on to our children and our grandchildren? Fear, anger, finger pointing, rather than the pursuit of happiness? Incompetence and anxiety, self-absorption, selfishness?”
The country, Biden said, was “crying out for leadership.”
Biden’s remarks came as his team moved urgently to press a more aggressive case against Trump at an extraordinarily high-stakes moment for the country, marked by a pandemic, devastating unemployment numbers, racial strife and violent clashes between the police and protesters during the demonstrations, which in many cities have led to looting.
Heightening the tensions, in the last several days alone, Trump has called protesters “terrorists,” spent time in an underground bunker and visited a church for photographs with a Bible, while peaceful protesters were dispersed with tear gas to clear his path. His campaign is increasingly seeking to paint Biden as sympathetic to those “causing mayhem,” as Trump’s team put it Tuesday.
To chart his own vision for the country, Biden left his home in Wilmington, Del., to travel to Philadelphia. It is the city where the nation’s founding documents were crafted, where President Barack Obama gave his famous speech on race in 2008, and where Biden held his first large-scale rally of the 2020 campaign, promising to heal the soul of the country. It is now also a city rocked by protests and growing racial tensions.
In his remarks, which lasted around 20 minutes, Biden urged his opponent to consult the Constitution and the Bible instead of eviscerating the “guardrails” of democracy.
“The president held up the Bible at St. John’s Church yesterday,” Biden, a practising Roman Catholic, said. “I just wish he opened it once in awhile instead of brandishing it. If he opened it, he could have learned something. That we’re all called to love one another as we love ourselves.”
Yet Bidenalso said that defeating him would not be enough to heal the nation’s centuries-old divisions. Seeking to acknowledge the pain and the chaos of the moment, he warned “we must not let our pain destroy us.”
“We’re a nation enraged,” he continued. “But we cannot let our rage consume us. We’re a nation that’s exhausted, but we will not allow our exhaustion to defeat us.”
Declaring this the time “for our nation to deal with systemic racism,” Biden called on Congress to pass measures including a ban on chokeholds. He urged a “model use-of-force standard.” And he highlighted his promise to create a national police oversight commission.
He said, “I’ll seek to heal the racial wounds that have long plagued our country.”