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On the country’s birthday, Biden offers hopeful counterpoint to Trump’s message
Annie Linskey, Washington Post (07/04/20)
Joe Biden on Saturday offered a counterpoint to the dark and defiant Fourth of July message President Trump delivered at Mount Rushmore, striking notes of unity in a video and op-ed released on the nation’s 244th birthday.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee noted that the Founding Fathers were flawed, pointing out that President Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and that women were not granted the full rights of citizenship until 1920. But he said their ideas still offer hope.
It was a stark contrast with Trump, who focused Friday on the men who built the country, saying they are heroes and that those skeptical of the country’s founders are part of a “radical ideology” and a “left-wing cultural revolution.”
The dueling Independence Day messages highlight the vastly different ways Biden and Trump have responded to the country’s racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis police custody.
Trump pushes the idea that demonstrators have gone too far and blames them for pulling apart the nation’s social fabric. Biden has suggested this moment offers the possibility for the country to course-correct, though he has yet to lay out promised plans for economic and police revisions.
“We have a chance now to give the marginalized, the demonized, the isolated [and] the oppressed a full share of the American Dream,” Biden said in his video. “We have a chance to rip the roots of systemic racism out of this country. We have a chance to live up to the words that have founded this nation.”
Biden emphasized the ideals articulated by America’s founders, focusing in his video on the foundational concept in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”
“Through it all, these words have gnawed at our conscience and pulled us toward justice,” Biden said in the video. “American history is no fairy tale. It’s been a constant push and pull between two parts of our character, the idea that all men and women — all people — are created equal and the racism that has torn us apart.”
He expanded on the idea in his op-ed.
“Independence Day is a celebration of our persistent march toward greater justice,” Biden wrote. “The natural expansion of our founding notion from ‘all men are created equal’ to ‘all people are created equal and should be treated equally throughout their lives.’ ” Trump on Friday decried that view of America’s history, as well as the recent efforts to remove statues. “This radical view of American history is a web of lies,” the president said.
Even the settings where both men spoke offered a massive difference: Trump, who has said he hopes the novel coronavirus will “just disappear,” spoke to a crowd of several thousand amid record numbers of new cases. Few wore masks. Little attempt was made at social distancing.
Biden, who has stressed the importance of following science and respecting the guidance of public health experts, recorded his video from his home in Delaware, where he has mostly stayed for nearly four months, venturing out for a handful of speeches and meetings, including visiting with protesters several weeks ago in Wilmington, Del.
Biden did not mention Trump in his video. But in his op-ed, published by NBC News, Biden criticized Trump by name, saying the president bears the most responsibility for the country being “thrown off course” in recent years.
“He finds new ways to tarnish and dismantle our democracy,” Biden said of Trump.
Tim Murtaugh, Trump’s campaign spokesman, blasted the former vice president.
“The idea that Biden, with his 40 plus years of DC failure, has any notion or ability to strengthen our union is absurd,” Murtaugh said in a statement.
“Because of political pressure from the left, Biden is forced to agree that America was fundamentally flawed from the beginning and remains so today. By contrast, President Trump is proud of our history and believes strongly in our present greatness.”
Biden also laid out some of the policy shifts he would pursue as president, pledging to undo what he called Trump’s attempts to “dismantle our democracy” by reducing barriers to voting, as well as by expanding voting by mail and early voting. He also said he would focus on the country’s campaign finance system, trying to limit any private funds going into federal elections, part of his anti-corruption plan.
He also renewed his promise to reverse Trump’s immigration policies, strengthen safeguards ensuring an independent judicial branch and protect the free press. He promised broadly to remove “systemic racism from every area of society it infects.”
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| Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden departs after speaking at Alexis Dupont High School in Wilmington, Del., on Tuesday. |
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At Mt. Rushmore and the White House, Trump Updates ‘American Carnage’ Message for 2020
Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, NY Times (07/04/20)
WASHINGTON — President Trump spent the Fourth of July weekend sowing national divide, ignoring his failings on the coronavirus and vowing to fight what he branded the “new far-left fascism.”
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| President Trump looked on during a military plane flyover at Mount Rushmore on Friday. |
He signaled even more clearly that he would exploit race and cultural flash points to stoke fear among his base of white supporters in an effort to win re-election. As he has done in the past, he resorted to exaggerated, apocalyptic language in broadly tarring the nationwide protests against entrenched racism and police brutality, saying that “angry mobs” sought to “unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities” and that those seeking to deface monuments want to “end America.”
Though Mr. Trump avoided references on Friday to the symbols of the Confederacy that have been a target of many protests, referring instead to monuments of America’s “founders,” he has in the past defended statues honoring Confederate soldiers as “beautiful.” And he has resisted renaming military bases named after Confederate generals, even as military leaders signaled their support for such a move.
Mr. Trump followed up with his remarks on Saturday from the South Lawn of the White House, which sounded more like a campaign rally, and repeated the themes from the previous evening.
“We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children or trample on our freedoms,” Mr. Trump said, claiming that protesters were “not interested in justice or healing.”
Mr. Trump cast himself as the heir to “American heroes” who defeated Nazis, fascists, communists and terrorists, all but drawing a direct line from such enemies to his domestic critics.
“We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who in many instances have absolutely no clue what they are doing,” he said.
Speaking to an audience that included front-line workers like doctors and nurses working to combat the coronavirus, Mr. Trump boasted about his administration’s response, even as more than 129,000 Americans have died and local officials in Washington warned against hosting a large gathering for the Independence Day holiday this year. Few on the White House South Lawn were wearing masks.
The president repeated his false claim that an abundance of testing made the country’s cases look worse than they were because they “show cases, 99 percent of which are totally harmless.” And he raised expectations for a vaccine “long before the end of the year.”
His remarks at Rushmore, and repeated from the grounds of the White House, were a reflection of his dire political standing as he nears the end of his first term in office. Mr. Trump is trailing former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, in national and battleground polls; lacks a booming economy or a positive message to campaign on as he tries to assign blame elsewhere for the spread of the coronavirus; and is leaning on culture wars instead to buoy his base of white supporters.
Sticking closely to the remarks on his teleprompter for both sets of remarks, with none of the joking and sarcastic asides that pepper his rally remarks, Mr. Trump delivered his speeches in a grim monotone that he often employs when reading from a script. His address had little of the celebration and joyfulness that presidents typically try to convey on the Fourth of July,
The speeches were drafted for Mr. Trump by his regular team of writers in the West Wing, who are led by Stephen Miller. Campaign officials said Saturday that they thought the speeches struck the right note for the moment
Campaign officials have repeatedly said they expect backlash against the progressive “cancel culture” movement to help the president’s standing with white suburban female voters, who they believe to be frightened by images of chaos in the city streets. But that backlash has yet to reveal itself in polls: A recent New York Times/Siena College survey showed that 75 percent of moderates and even 53 percent of somewhat conservative voters have a favorable opinion of Black Lives Matter.
Central to Mr. Trump’s approach, however, is a belief he and some of his advisers share that voters are misleading pollsters about their support for the nationwide protests, several allies said. As he has sought to present himself as the candidate of law and order, Mr. Trump has rejected suggestions from some aides who have urged him to do more to address racism in America, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in the custody of police officers in Minneapolis.
Instead, he has intensified his criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement. In a post last week on Twitter, he called the words Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate” as he criticized plans by the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, to paint the phrase on Fifth Avenue outside Trump Tower.
The searing tone he has adopted is in large part aimed at consolidating support within his own party. Private Republican polling indicates the president is slipping in red states, in large part because conservative-leaning voters are unsettled.
“Trump needs — or thinks he needs — fear of ‘the other’ to motivate his base and create enthusiasm,” said Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster. “Right now, people are fearful of Covid-19, but that is inconvenient for Trump, so he is trying to kick up fear about something he thinks will benefit his re-election: angry mobs of leftists tearing down American history.”
Ms. Matthews noted that his rhetoric does little more than solidify the voters who were already likely to return to his corner. “He has no interest at all in expanding his base or even pulling back in those who have departed,” she said.
Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said that past presidents have typically sought to diffuse cultural battles, “giving people this amorphous kind of middle where they can continue to live.” Mr. Trump, however, is unlike any of his predecessors.
“Donald Trump does not give you that choice — you are either with him or against him,” said Mr. Murray, whose latest survey this week showed Mr. Biden leading 53 percent to 41 percent. “He is forcing people to take sides. And when they take sides, more of them are moving to the other side.”
In Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump also faces a centrist opponent who is not easily branded as a radical liberal, but rather one who is seen as a palatable alternative to some older voters and Republicans in a way that Hillary Clinton was not. Mr. Biden, for instance, has said he does not support defunding the police, and has made careful distinctions between tearing down monuments to the country’s founding fathers and those commemorating Confederate leaders.
That hasn’t stopped the Trump campaign from claiming that in the black-and-white world it wants to present to voters in November, Mr. Biden is on the side of violent looters. “The first instinct of Joe Biden and his party is to agree with the agitators that there is something fundamentally wrong with America and that there always has been,” Mr. Murtaugh said.
In some ways, the divisive place that Mr. Trump has landed on Independence Day is where he has always felt most comfortable campaigning. “He’s totally opportunistic,” said William Kristol, the conservative writer and prominent “Never Trump” Republican.
He noted that Mr. Trump had never weighed in on the immigration debate before he made building a wall along the Mexican border the signature issue of his 2016 presidential campaign because he saw that it worked. “If you don’t care about damaging the country and abandoned normal guardrails of presidential discourse,” Mr. Kristol said, “you just keep trying things and hope something sticks.”
Jonathan Martin contributed reporting from Washington, and Shane Goldmacher from New York.
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