- michael barbaro
From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”
Today: In the days since a man affiliated with a far-right group was killed in Portland, Oregon, President Trump has sought to pin the blame on Democrats. In a major speech, Joe Biden tried to turn that story around.
- [music]
It’s Tuesday, September 1.
Alex Burns, why did Joe Biden give this speech on Monday?
- alex burns
Michael, it’s a couple different forces all really coinciding. And they’re coinciding at the moment when traditionally the campaign would get hot just as a matter of the calendar we have passed — the two parties’ conventions, Labor Day is upon us. We’re in the homestretch. And what has happened over the last few weeks is that a number of existing dynamics in the campaign have really intensified. And the stakes for both candidates, but particularly Joe Biden, because he’s the challenger, have gotten higher. The Republican convention last week —
- archived recording (mike pence)
You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.
- alex burns
— was the most sustained negative attack on Joe Biden that has happened in this race, even frankly going back to the Democratic primary. Just a relentless barrage on his political ideas, his party —
- archived recording
Anarchists have been flooding our streets. And Democrat mayors are ordering the police to stand down.
- alex burns
— on this message that Joe Biden is outside the mainstream and that he’s in league with dangerous radicals in the streets. That’s obviously a factually flawed message. That coincided with a period of intensifying unrest and social disorder on the streets of cities like Portland, Oregon and, more significantly for the purposes of a presidential election —
- archived recording
We’re following breaking news out of Kenosha. Two people shot and killed overnight. And we just learned one was shot in the head, the other shot in the chest.
- alex burns
Kenosha, Wisconsin, a crucial part of a crucial Midwestern swing state —
- archived recording
All of this happening during the third night of unrest after Jacob Blake was shot by police.
- alex burns
You had the Republican convention unfolding at the same time as you had protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake that then culminated with the killing of two people by a 17-year-old white gunman from out-of-state. And then this past weekend —
- archived recording
The plan was for thousands of the president’s supporters to drive their decorated vehicles around Portland.
- alex burns
— we saw Trump supporters driving through the streets of Portland.
- archived recording
But some in the pro-Trump caravan veered off the planned route, going into the city’s downtown core — [PEOPLE YELLING] — where startling confrontations with counterprotesters unfolded.
- alex burns
Shooting paintball guns at protesters, clashing with them —
- archived recording
The evening turned deadly when a man standing in front of this parking garage was shot.
- alex burns
— culminating with a member of a far-right group being shot dead.
- michael barbaro
Hm.
- alex burns
And all of that then coincides with the nature of Joe Biden’s political coalition. That he is entering the general election with a theory of how you win that is based on putting together strong support from African-American voters of all ages, but including younger Black voters who have been somewhat less enthusiastic about Joe Biden — putting together their support with powerful backing from white moderates. Including white moderates who are maybe a little to the right of center, people who have voted Republican in the past but who really find President Trump unacceptable. And that is a tricky coalition to hold together at a moment of civil disorder like this.
And so the challenge for Biden at a moment like this is, can you speak broadly across that coalition in a way that, on the one hand, gives people who are invested in a racial justice movement confidence that you are on their side, but also sends a message to people who are more concerned about law and order, or public order — or at least are simultaneously concerned about that, even if they’re also concerned about racial justice — to send a message to them that, you know what, I get your concerns, too?
- michael barbaro
Mhm. And into this tricky coalition and this conflict inherent in the Biden campaign comes a series of attacks, as you have indicated, at the Republican National Convention that appear very much designed to pit these two elements of the Biden coalition against each other. By calling Biden lawless, Trump seems to be going after those moderate white voters. And at the same time, daring Joe Biden to challenge those young Black voters in his coalition.
- alex burns
What you really saw the president and his party try to do last week was to set up a binary choice for Joe Biden. That either you were on the side of the folks who are burning down stores in Kenosha, or you are on the side of the police. And President Trump, presented with that choice, has no difficulty saying which side he’s on — that he’s on the side of the police. And I think that translates to a lot of people as being on the side of white police against Black rioters.
That’s not a choice that Joe Biden wants to make, believes he has to make. Because there isn’t a sense, I think, on the Biden side of this race that there is some irreconcilable conflict between supporting racial justice and police reform and also supporting public order. But that’s the wedge that the president tried all of last week to drive and that, even as we speak, is continuing to try to drive.
- michael barbaro
And that is the needle that Joe Biden was trying to thread in this speech on Monday.
- alex burns
That’s right.
- archived recording (joe biden)
Good afternoon. I want to thank Carnegie Mellon for providing this space.
- michael barbaro
So Alex, tell us about this speech.
- alex burns
So we saw Joe Biden go to Pittsburgh.
- archived recording (joe biden)
— to a little bit about what’s going on right now.
- alex burns
And standing before a row of flags, he came out and spoke to the issue of law and order and public safety.
- archived recording (joe biden)
We have to stand against violence in every form it takes. Violence, we’ve seen again and again and again, of unwarranted police shooting, excessive force.
- alex burns
Talking about how he does see a complete difference between peaceful protest of legitimate grievances after events, like the shooting of Jacob Blake —
- archived recording (joe biden)
Seven bullets in the back of Jacob Blake, knee in the neck of George Floyd, killing of Breonna Taylor in her own apartment.
- alex burns
— and what he called the “violence of extremists.”
- archived recording (joe biden)
Violence of extremists and opportunists, right-wing militias, the senseless violence of looting and burning and destruction of property.
- alex burns
And he said —
- archived recording (joe biden)
So I’m going to be very clear about all of this. Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting.
- alex burns
Anything that falls into the latter category is not protesting, it is lawlessness.
- archived recording (joe biden)
It’s lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted.
- alex burns
And it’s totally unacceptable and it has to stop.
- archived recording (joe biden)
It divides instead of unites, destroys businesses, only hurts the working families that serve the community.
- alex burns
This is the kind of rhetoric that I think a lot of Democrats were looking for from Biden last week. And he got there a little bit later than they wanted him to. But he very much got there today.
- archived recording (joe biden)
This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence, because for years, he’s fomented it.
- alex burns
This speech was broader, though, than just a rebuttal on that one line of attack from President Trump. You saw Biden deliver, I think it’s fair to say, a more complex argument than we’ve seen him give in any context in the general election besides his convention speech, where he tried to turn around the issue of safety and public order against the president.
- archived recording (joe biden)
Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is re-elected?
- alex burns
And accused the president of being unwilling to denounce extremism and violent acts on the part of his own supporters. Said that —
- archived recording (joe biden)
Donald Trump looks at this violence and he sees a political lifeline. Because he won’t stand up to any form of violence. He’s got no problem with right-wing militia, white supremacists and vigilantes with assault weapons, often better armed than the police, often in the middle of the violence.
- alex burns
The president has been behaving in a weak fashion because he won’t take on his own supporters who are acting like an armed militia in this country. That is something that we know really resonates with voters in the middle. This sense that Donald Trump will not take on the extreme right. And so from the top of the speech, which was very much on defense, you immediately saw Joe Biden shift onto his front foot and try to make this a problem for the president.
- archived recording (joe biden)
He’s supposed to be protecting this country. But instead, he’s rooting for chaos and violence. The simple truth is Donald Trump failed to protect America. So now he’s trying to scare America.
- alex burns
That’s when he gets into what I think is really the core conceptual heart of this speech. It’s trying to broaden the definition of feeling secure and feeling safe.
- archived recording (joe biden)
Do you really feel safer under Donald Trump? We’re now on track to more than 200,000 deaths in this country due to Covid.
- alex burns
Asking voters to look not just at acts of vandalism and violence in the streets, but at the Covid pandemic and at the economic devastation of the Covid pandemic.
- archived recording (joe biden)
Nearly one in six small businesses is closed in this country today. Do you really feel safer under Trump?
- alex burns
And then pushing back on the caricature that the Republicans drew of him —
- archived recording (joe biden)
You know me. You know my heart. You know my story, my family’s story.
- alex burns
— in what I thought was kind of this disarming moment, looking into the camera and saying —
- archived recording (joe biden)
Ask yourself, do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really?
- alex burns
— do I look like a socialist radical to you? That rhetorical question tells you so much about the Biden candidacy. That it has been a foundational political assumption of his from the beginning of this race that the country just knows who he is. And they know that he’s a good and decent man. That, at the end of the day, he believes people know him too well to buy this idea that in his heart he is happy when Kenosha is on fire. And in going after that Republican caricature of him, Biden deployed this rhetorical device that we have heard him use a couple of times over the last week, which is to say —
- archived recording (joe biden)
Since Donald Trump and Mike Pence can’t run on their record that has seen more American deaths to a virus, this virus, than the nation’s suffered in every war since Korea combined, since they have no agenda or vision for a second term, Trump and Pence are running on this. And I find it fascinating. Quote, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.” And what’s their proof? The violence we’re seeing in Donald Trump’s America. These are not images of some imagined Joe Biden America in the future. These are images of Donald Trump’s America today.
He keeps telling you, if only he was president, it wouldn’t happen. If he was president, he keeps telling us, if he was president, you’d feel safe. Well, he is president!
- alex burns
Now I don’t know that that’s going to be terribly persuasive to people who see what’s going on in Portland, see what’s going on in Kenosha, and they certainly don’t feel that it’s part of their current experience of America. They see that it’s a sort of ghost of Christmas future. If we make the wrong choice, my community, too, could look like that. But I think for the broader audience that Joe Biden is speaking to, it is a useful reminder that this is not some hypothetical dystopia that the president is conjuring in his TV ads. These are scenes on the news. This is happening today.
- archived recording (joe biden)
Donald Trump is determined to instill fear in America. That’s what his entire campaign for the presidency has come down to. Fear. But I believe Americans are stronger than that.
- alex burns
By the end of the speech, Biden has made the core of his argument very plain. Which is that at this point in the race, the president’s last resort, first resort, his resort in the middle is to just try to scare the hell out of you. And Biden’s retort to that is that what should scare you is what’s going on right now. It’s not this distorted version of what a President Biden would do. It is what President Trump has done.
- archived recording (joe biden)
This is the United States of America. There’s not a single thing beyond our capacity when we decide to do it together. So let’s get together. And I want to thank you all. May God bless you. And may God protect our troops.
- michael barbaro
We’ll be right back.
Alex, in watching this speech, I was thinking about this essay by George Packer in The Atlantic over the weekend. And it was called, quote, “This Is How Biden Loses.” And in it, Packer talks about this idea that the Trump campaign and the Republican party’s messaging around what’s happening in American cities, that to some degree, it’s working. That Kenosha has placed the Democratic party in a trap of a kind. Where they’ve embraced the protests, the message of the protests. And while they’ve also denounced the looting and the violence, that that part of the message may not be getting through so clearly to some Americans. And that that is a real problem for Biden.
- alex burns
So I guess my own read on things would be a little bit more cautious than George Packer’s. That I don’t know that it’s true that this is working. I think that it has changed the conversation about the race, that President Trump is on offense in this way really for the first time in a while after being on defense for so many months. Whether that’s changing voters minds, I really don’t know. And I don’t think George Packer does, either. I think there’s a lot of sort of speculation and projection involved onto what white voters in the Midwest would probably think about this. But I do think that there is significant reason to believe, based on past experience — including the experience of 2016 — that the president’s current message would have considerable appeal to groups that he needs to peel away from Joe Biden in order to win the election.
So this is why Democrats were as nervous as they were last week and through the weekend — on top of the fact that just Democrats are always nervous about everything — was just this feeling that, oh my goodness, the president’s doing it again. And we are being too passive. What Biden did today, I think, will go a long way towards easing people’s concern that, does he even know the right thing to say?
I think Democrats look at the speech today and think, he does know the right thing to say. And in fact, he sort of did know the right thing to say last week. He just maybe wasn’t saying it as frequently as he needed to or as loud as he needed to. The speech today was pretty loud. And we are going to see how often he intends to or feels he needs to reiterate that message.
- michael barbaro
Alex, do you think it’s true that, at least until now, Americans have not heard the message from Biden and other Democrats when they have denounced looting? And if that’s the case, why do you think it’s the case?
- alex burns
I think it’s true that we have not heard as much from Democrats about looting, vandalism, crime, social disorder, certainly relative to what we have heard from the Republicans, and certainly relative to what we have heard from Democrats about police violence. That it’s absolutely true that Democrats have been overwhelmingly focused on what they see as the actual main problem, which is racism in law enforcement and racism generally. And that I think we saw last week from Biden, we saw last week from his running mate Kamala Harris, these sort of asides about how inappropriate the violence is. What we saw Biden do that was different on Monday was put that front and center. That if you watched just the first three minutes of his speech, the big thing you would take away was Joe Biden thinks the riots are unacceptable.
- michael barbaro
Mhm. I’m curious, Alex, why didn’t we hear about Portland and Kenosha directly, beyond the mention of the victim of police violence in Kenosha? I mean, why was that, do you think? I mean, isn’t there a version of this speech where Biden blames the president far more explicitly for the violence in these places, where he takes the president’s talking point that liberal mayors and governors and the radical left have enabled and caused these scenes in American cities and flips it around and says, no, there have been three deaths in the past two weeks in these cities. And in my mind, they have been on you, Mr. President.
I mean, to give the example of what happened in Kenosha, the young man who shows up in town with a rifle, Kyle Rittenhouse, who sees himself as an ally of the police, he ends up killing somebody in that city. And he had attended a Trump rally, taped himself at a Trump rally, and really celebrated his association with the president.
- alex burns
You know, I think there are Democratic candidates who might have gone there. Joe Biden is not one of those Democratic candidates. That he has been pretty careful throughout this campaign. He launched his candidacy with a video talking about Charlottesville.
- archived recording
[CHANTING] You will not replace us! You will not replace us!
- archived recording (joe biden)
It was there on August of 2017. We saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open.
- alex burns
The white supremacist march there and the killing of a young woman —
- archived recording (joe biden)
And that’s when we heard the words of the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation.
- alex burns
And attacking the president, condemning the president for not unequivocally denouncing the white supremacists in that march.
- archived recording (joe biden)
He said there were, quote, “Some very fine people on both sides.” Very fine people on both sides?
- alex burns
He never said the president is responsible for her death. Her blood is on his hands. That’s not something that we have heard from him really at any point in this race. That he has a sense of what he feels the boundaries are in politics. And I think that he has a sense of what the boundaries are of what the public is going to consider credible and acceptable and fair. That, you know, do you want to stake your candidacy and your argument here on the claim that you can draw a straight line from the president of the United States to a specific gunman and a specific killing? Maybe you do. There are probably candidates who would not balk at doing that.
But what you saw Biden do, and this is what he has done from the start of the race, is make this more general argument that the president sets a tone. The president has a role as a leader. And he can choose to divide, or he can choose to unite. And what the president has done is incite violence broadly so that it’s sort of a toxin in the system. It’s not just this one thing that happened. I don’t know whether the other approach would have been more effective in this setting.
But I think that where Biden did go is a place where, I think broadly, people in his party are comfortable with him going and where moderate voters are comfortable with him going. There are people in the middle in the country who, as much as they dislike the president or distrust the president, there’s only so far they’ll go in just putting everything that happens at the feet of the president.
- michael barbaro
Mhm. Alex, an underlying message of this entire speech from Biden was that, as much as the president wants to talk about what’s going on in a handful of American cities involving race, protests, unrest, that what Americans really care about right now is the pandemic and the economic fallout from it. I wonder if based on what we have seen over the past 7 to 10 days, that the reality of this general election is that we’re going to be spending a lot of time talking about this line of attack and counterattack between Trump and Biden over law-and-order protests, violence, and not as much about what Biden seems to be betting that voters care more about — the economy and the pandemic.
- alex burns
You know, I think it’s hard to say, sitting here on the last day of August that the pandemic will certainly be the main voting issue on Election Day. But based on our entire experience of this year, the pandemic and the economic devastation that it has created are really the foundational context for everything else that’s talked about in this race. And the good news for Joe Biden is that, for now and for nearly the entirety of the year, those are issues where the president has been at a disadvantage.
What’s complicated for Joe Biden is that the specific places where he needs to win in order to carry the electoral college are places where the law and order message, and the message about crime and rioting and vandalism and disorder can have distinctive appeal, even within the context of the pandemic. That’s the concern for Democrats. That’s the concern for the Biden campaign. That there will be a population of moderate voters, overwhelmingly white voters in the suburbs of the Midwest, who will feel some kind of tension between how they feel about the president’s handling of the pandemic and who they trust on issues of law and order. And that some tiny sliver of those people — it might be more than a tiny sliver — but all it would take would be a pretty modest share of those voters flipping back to President Trump to suddenly make the advantage that Joe Biden has in the Midwest look much, much more tenuous.
- michael barbaro
Alex, thank you very much.
- alex burns
Thank you.
- michael barbaro
During a news conference at the White House on Monday night —
- archived recording
Your supporters were also in Portland this weekend, firing paintball guns at people, some form of pepper spray. So do you want to also take this chance to condemn what your supporters did in Portland?
- archived recording (donald trump)
Well, I understand they had large numbers of people that were supporters. But that was a peaceful protest.
- michael barbaro
President Trump refused to condemn supporters who have attacked protesters in recent days, including those in Portland who fired paintballs into crowds.
- archived recording (donald trump)
And paint is not — and paint as a defensive mechanism, paint is not bullets.
- michael barbaro
Trump also declined to condemn Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old Trump supporter accused of killing two people during the clashes in Kenosha.
- archived recording (donald trump)
That was an interesting situation. You saw the same tape as I saw. And he was trying to get away from them, I guess. It looks like. And he fell. And then they very violently attacked him.
- michael barbaro
We’ll be right back.
Here’s what else you need to know today. The Times reports that the number of coronavirus infections in the U.S. has surpassed 6 million — the latest evidence of how widely the pandemic has spread across the country since the start of the year.
Overseas, India reached its own grim milestone. The country now has the world’s third highest death toll after the U.S. and Brazil, with nearly 65,000 killed by the virus. Meanwhile, infections are surging across much of Europe, including France, Germany and Greece, but above all in Spain, which reported more than 53,000 new cases in the past week. As of Monday, the coronavirus was spreading faster in Spain than in the United States.
That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.