CLEAR LAKE, Iowa — Former Vice President Joe Biden compared President Trump’s time in office to the 1860s and the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan was a powerful force in Washington D.C.
Calling Trump an “existential threat” in his remarks at the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding Dinner Friday night, Biden said: “He’s unleashed a constant battle that’s taken place in America from the beginning.”
“We have been here before … with the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War. We’ve been here when three thousand Klansmen in 1925 walked down the streets of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., wearing full garb and wearing their pointed hats and the like,” he said.
Biden added, “When there were over 30 members of the House who were declared Klan’s members — when, in fact, there were, I think, six or seven senators who were open Klan members. But ladies and gentlemen, you know, we fought back.”
Biden brought it back to the 2017 events of Charlottesville, Virginia, a usual refrain of his stump speech, when riots broke out and a protester was killed after a white nationalist rammed his car into the crowd.
“You know, when you saw those people walking out in the fields in Charlottesville. their contorted faces with anger chanting the anti-Semitic bile … carrying Nazi flags accompanied by white supremacists as well as Ku Klux Klan,” Biden said. “The fact was that what happened then was David Duke talked about the president of the United States in terms of, ‘This is what we wanted him to do.’”
The dinner, a grassroots fundraiser for participating county parties that goes toward their general funds, included remarks from nearly all the other Democratic presidential primary pool candidates.
