No longer confined to the basement in his Delaware home due to coronavirus shutdowns, Joe Biden delivered a somber, angry rebuttal to President Trump at Philadelphia City Hall, in the city that houses his campaign headquarters and where the United States was born.
The former vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee opened the Tuesday address with “I can’t breathe,” the dying words of George Floyd, the black Minneapolis man who died after a white police officer held a knee on his neck and whose death sparked nationwide protests over police brutality and racial tensions. Biden called on Congress to take up police reform legislation.
But he shifted the campaign speech to highlight the choice between himself and Trump, mocking the president for not reading the Bible at a photo op in front of the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church — “I just wish he’d open it every once in awhile” – and asserting that Trump “is part of the problem and accelerates it.”
“I wish I could say that hate began with Donald Trump and will end with him,” Biden said of racial tensions and unrest. “It didn’t, and it won’t. American history isn’t a fairy tale with a guaranteed happy ending.”
Biden blasted Trump for tweeting, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase uttered by the Miami chief of police in 1967.
“The battle for the soul of this nation has been a constant push and pull more than 240 years,” Biden said, echoing one of his campaign slogans. “It’s always a fight, and the battle is never fully won.”
“I will seek to heal the racial wounds that have long plagued this country — not use them for political gain.”
