MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota — Ask Vice President Mike Pence about the unrest in Louisville, and he raises first the fate of two police officers shot during protests. Ask again, and he defers to the judgment of the grand jury that considered the evidence and decided not to bring charges against police in the shooting of Breonna Taylor.
“And let me just say what happened to Breonna Taylor was a tragedy. By all accounts, this was a good person who served her community. For her to lose her life in that kind of way is just heartbreaking,” he told the Washington Examiner on his campaign bus en route to see damage from another explosion of anger at police brutality, this time in Minneapolis.
The violence in Louisville is the latest convulsion in a year of anger and one of multiple crises plaguing the nation ahead of November’s election. Pence’s bus tour took him through their confluence, from Eau Claire in Wisconsin, where the governor this week declared a new public emergency as COVID-19 surged, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he saw the rubble remains of a salon destroyed in May.
The Trump campaign is banking on its law and order message offering reassurance to worried voters longing for an end to fiery scenes of rage. For Pence, that means pledging his support to law enforcement officers and condemning violence, whether in the wake of the Taylor case or the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
“I can understand the heartbreak of any loss of life. But I think I have great confidence justice was served in that case and that justice will be served in Minneapolis as well,” he said.
“There’s no excuse for what happened to George Floyd. But there’s also no excuse for the violence and the devastation, the extent of which we may see on the way into Minneapolis, that, in many cases, victimized minority families.”
The reds and golds of fall in Wisconsin streak past the windows of his bus as he speaks. Ivanka Trump and her daughter Arabella have hitched a ride up front with Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, while Pence and a couple of aides conduct business from a cabin in the rear.
Two hours into the journey, and the bus turns off the highway into north Minneapolis for an unannounced stop. It pulls up alongside what used to be Flora’s Hair Design.
Now, it is nothing more than a lot filled with bricks and splintered wood.
Owner Flora Westbrooks describes in a breaking voice how it was burned down in protests.
“I came here in the morning, it was here. I came back at 5 o’clock, it was…” she said, her voice trailing off. She has told her story over and over, but she looks as if she relives the horror every time.
“We’re with you,” Pence said. And at a Cops for Trump event in the city later, he heard from other people who lost their livelihoods in the violence and promised to help Westbrooks rebuild her business.
Earlier, on the bus, as he attacked Democratic politicians’ demands to defund the police, he warned that African American communities were frequently worst-hit by looting.
“You’ve got to address it in a number of different ways. No. 1, we’re not going to defund the police, we’re not going to reimagine the police, as Joe Biden’s running mate said,” he continued. Instead, he argued that more funding would be key to protecting public safety, enhancing training on the use of force, and promoting accountability — themes central to Sen. Tim Scott’s legislation that was voted down by Democrats.
The Taylor case, he said, was another example of how tragedy finds black families.
Met Flora at her 35 year old small business, Flora’s Hair Design, an American dream that was burnt to the ground.
We are with you and the people of Minneapolis. God Bless. pic.twitter.com/Q9KyE5Ehz1
— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) September 25, 2020
“We have an epidemic of violence that tears apart families in our African American communities in these Democrat-run cities that have been literally looking the other way, and in recent years, undermining law enforcement at a time when people suffering the most are families that live in those communities,” he said.
It is not the only epidemic that Pence has on his mind. A day earlier, he chaired a meeting of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. The death toll is above 200,000, and with fall in full effect in this part of the Midwest, public health experts are bracing for more waves of COVID-19 cases.
In the week before his visit, Wisconsin reported its four-highest daily new case counts. And the test positivity rate is running at more than 13%.
Pence said he was encouraged by the reducing rates of hospitalization. With 130,000 ventilators in the national stockpile, progress in therapeutics, targets for states on personal protective equipment, and a vaccine expected by the end of the year, the country was well-equipped.
“We are preparing for whatever comes. But given the progress we have made in therapeutics and the extraordinary progress on vaccines,” he said, “we are coming to a place before the end of this year when we begin to put the coronavirus in the past.”
Recent headlines have suggested a tug of war between the White House and the Food and Drug Administration over authorizing new vaccines, pitching an impatient president against the caution of scientists. But Pence said Democrats were spreading fear by accusing the administration of putting politics first.
“Dr. Hahn, others in and around the process, have repeatedly assured the American people,” he said, referring to the head of the FDA. “That’s what makes Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s comments about vaccines so irresponsible, the fact that Joe Biden’s running mate actually said she wouldn’t trust a vaccine produced under President Donald Trump.”
“That’s a great insult to the extraordinary researchers at pharmaceutical companies, it’s an insult to the FDA, to the National Institutes of Health, to all of the incredible men and women that are working to produce a vaccine that will save lives.”
