Former vice president Joe Biden will accuse President Donald Trump of inspiring mass shootings, during remarks Biden is scheduled to deliver in Iowa on Wednesday afternoon.
Among the remarks released by the Biden campaign, according to Axios, are the following:
- “How far is it from Trump’s saying this ‘is an invasion’ to the shooter in El Paso declaring ‘his attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas?’ Not far at all.”
- “How far is it from the white supremacists and Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville — Trump’s ‘very fine people,’ chanting ‘You will not replace us’ — to the shooter at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh saying Jews ‘were committing genocide to his people?’ Not far at all.”
- “We’re living through a rare moment in this nation’s history. Where our president isn’t up to the moment. Where our president lacks the moral authority to lead. Where our president has more in common with George Wallace than George Washington.”
Ironically, Biden’s above remarks are filled with what can only be described as false and inflammatory statements.
- The El Paso gunman specifically stated in his alleged manifesto that he had arrived at his racist ideas before Trump came onto the national political scene and disavowed any link to Trump.
- The claim that Trump called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville “very fine people” has been repeatedly debunked. Trump was referring to non-violent protesters on both sides of the issue of the removal of a Confederate statue; he specifically stated that neo-Nazis and white supremacists should be “condemned totally.”
- George Wallace, a segregationist Democrat, was shot while campaigning for president in 1972. (Ironically, Biden actually once boasted about receiving an award from Wallace.) The irony of comparing Trump to a candidate who was nearly assassinated, while accusing Trump of incitement, seems to have escaped the Biden campaign.
Biden will also accuse Trump of having “fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation.” In fact, extremist killings declined 39% during the first two years of the Trump administration, compared to the last two years of the Obama administration.
Biden will apparently ignore left-wing shooters — such as the Dayton, Ohio, shooter, who supported Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT); the terrorist who attacked an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility last month, and echoed rhetoric comparing migrant facilities to “concentration camps”; and the left-wing gunman, Sanders supporter, and Rachel Maddow fan who attacked a Republican baseball practice in 2017.
The former vice president has come under withering attack from his Democratic rivals for his repeated praise of segregationists and his past use of racial rhetoric.
In addition, Biden — like most of the rest of the Democratic Party presidential field — has courted the support of Al Sharpton, who has a long history of racism, antisemitism, and incendiary rhetoric.
In the 2012 campaign, running for re-election, Biden infamously told a predominantly African-American crowd that Republican nominee Mitt Romney was “gonna put y’all back in chains.”
In the 2016 election, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to associate Trump with white supremacy in a speech in Reno, Nevada, that set the tone for her campaign to follow. The effort ended in political failure.
Biden’s rhetoric follows similar claims in the liberal media, such as MSNBC’s use of a chyron touting “TRUMP-INSPIRED TERRORISM” on Tuesday evening.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.