2020 Election Live Updates: Biden Charges That Trump ‘Can’t Stop the Violence Because for Years He’s Fomented It’
As President Trump unleashed tweets that seemed to support confrontation, Joe Biden gave a speech in Pittsburgh asking: “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is re-elected?”
transcript
‘We Need Safety in America,’ Biden Says, Denouncing Trump
Joseph R. Biden Jr. said that he would keep Americans safer than President Trump has in a speech aimed at deflecting criticism from Republicans that Mr. Biden would preside over a country wracked by lawlessness.
Does anyone believe there’d less violence in America if Donald Trump is re-elected? We need justice in America. We need safety in America. We’re facing multiple crises, crises that under Donald Trump have kept multiplying — Covid, economic devastation, unwarranted police violence, emboldened white nationalists. I believe if I were president today, the country would be safer and we’d see a lot less violence and here’s why: I’ve said we must address the issue of racial injustice. I’ve personally spoken to George Floyd’s family and to Jacob Blake’s family. I know their pain, and so do you. I know the justice they seek, and so do you. An average of a thousand people dying every day in the month of August — do you really feel safer under Donald Trump? Mr. Trump, you want to talk about fear? Do you know people are afraid of in America? They’re afraid they’re going to get Covid. They’re afraid they’re going to get sick and die. And that is in no small part because of you.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday issued a forceful rebuttal to President Trump’s misleading charges that he would preside over a country wracked by disorder and lawlessness, claiming that it was the president who had made the country unsafe through his erratic and incendiary governing style.
“This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country,” Mr. Biden said in his most prominent effort yet to deflect the barrage of criticism Republicans levied against him at their convention last week. “He can’t stop the violence because for years he’s fomented it.”
Against a backdrop of street violence unfolding in multiple cities across the nation, Mr. Biden condemned destruction, noted that chaos was unfolding on the president’s watch, and charged that Mr. Trump had made the country unsafe, both by stoking division amid an outcry over racism and police brutality and through his handling of the coronavirus crisis and the economy.
“Rioting is not protesting,” Mr. Biden said of the unrest. “Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting, it’s lawlessness plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted.”
At another point, Mr. Biden expressed incredulity at the idea that he is some kind of “radical.”
“Ask yourself: do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” Mr. Biden, 77, said. “Really? I want a safe America. Safe from Covid, safe from crime and looting, safe from racially-motivated violence, safe from bad cops. Let me be crystal clear: safe from four more years of Donald Trump.”
Mr. Biden promised to work to bring together those protesting for racial justice — a cause he supports — with police officers, and said he would unite the country more broadly as he also condemned police shootings of Black Americans.
At one point, Mr. Biden challenged the president directly.
“Mr. Trump, you want to talk about fear?’‘ Mr. Biden asked. “Do you know what people are afraid of in America? They’re afraid they’re going to get Covid. They’re afraid they’re going to get sick and die. And that is no small part because of you.” He noted that more police officers had died from the coronavirus than were killed on patrol.
How Mr. Biden handles the unrest playing out in places including the battleground state of Wisconsin may shape the contours of the fall campaign, at a moment when a number of Democrats have urged his team to be more visible on the issue. On Monday, he cast his candidacy as a force for calm — as president he would be “looking to lower the temperature in this country, not raise it” — and described Mr. Trump as having a corrosive and “toxic” effect on the country.
“Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is re-elected?” Mr. Biden said.
On Election Day, he said, voters will decide, “Will we rid ourselves of this toxin?”
Much of the Republican argument against Mr. Biden on “law and order” issues is rooted in false claims about Mr. Biden’s positions. He opposes defunding the police, for example, though Republicans have inaccurately said he supports that policy.
And contrary to Republican distortions of his record on battling crime, Mr. Biden, to the discomfort of progressives and some criminal justice advocates, played a key role in shepherding the 1994 crime bill into law. The bill was supported at the time by a wide array of figures including President Bill Clinton and Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was then New York’s mayor, but many experts now associate it with mass incarceration.
But some Democrats worry that Mr. Biden has not been visible enough in laying out his own views on such searing issues, and he sought to put those concerns to rest in Pittsburgh.
Despite pleas from state and local officials, Mr. Trump plans to travel on Tuesday to Kenosha, Wis., where disturbances broke out after a white police officer shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake, a Black man. Two people protesting the police shooting were shot and killed last week, and a 17-year-old, Kyle H. Rittenhouse, who attended a Trump rally earlier this year, was charged in their killing.
The White House press secretary claimed on Monday that President Trump had not watched a video that he tweeted from his personal account over the weekend of his supporters unloading pepper spray and paintballs against protesters in Portland, Ore.
“I don’t think the president has seen that video. Nor have I,” said the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, at a White House briefing, when asked about the president’s views of his supporters doing that.
Yet Mr. Trump retweeted a video posted by a New York Times reporter, Mike Baker, of his supporters doing just that. Mr. Baker’s brief description of the video said, “Trump people unload paintballs and pepper spray.”
The big backlash going on in Portland cannot be unexpected after 95 days of watching and incompetent Mayor admit that he has no idea what he is doing. The people of Portland won’t put up with no safety any longer.The Mayor is a FOOL. Bring in the National Guard! https://t.co/bM6ypak94t
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2020
The tweet was part of an especially intense barrage of Twitter messages unleashed by the president over the weekend, in which he embraced fringe conspiracy theories claiming that the coronavirus death toll has been exaggerated and that street protests are actually an organized coup d’état against him.
In a concentrated predawn burst on Sunday, the president posted or reposted 89 messages between 5:49 a.m. and 8:04 a.m. on top of 18 the night before, many of them inflammatory comments or assertions about violent clashes in Portland, Ore., where a man wearing the hat of a far-right, pro-Trump group was shot and killed Saturday after a large group of Mr. Trump’s supporters traveled through the streets. He resumed on Sunday night and picked up the thread of his attacks on protests again on Monday morning.
In the blast of social media messages, Mr. Trump also embraced a call to imprison Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, threatened to send federal forces against demonstrators outside the White House, attacked CNN and NPR, embraced a supporter charged with murder, mocked his challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and repeatedly assailed the mayor of Portland, even posting the mayor’s office telephone number so that supporters could call demanding his resignation.
One of the most incendiary messages was a retweet of a program from the One America News Network, a pro-Trump channel that advances extreme theories and that the president has turned to when he feels that Fox News has not been supportive enough. The message he retweeted Saturday night promoted a segment accusing demonstrators of secretly plotting Mr. Trump’s downfall.
“According to the mainstream media, the riots & extreme violence are completely unorganized,” the tweet said. “However, it appears this coup attempt is led by a well funded network of anarchists trying to take down the President.” Accompanying it was an image of a promo for a segment titled “America Under Siege: The Attempt to Overthrow President Trump.”
— Maggie Haberman and
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The singer and activist Harry Belafonte denounced President Trump and his staff on Monday after the White House deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, posted a manipulated video that altered an old clip of Mr. Belafonte falling asleep before an interview to make it appear as if it was the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was napping.
“They keep stooping lower and lower,” Mr. Belafonte said in a statement provided to The New York Times. “A technical glitch in an interview I did nine years ago now becomes another one of their lies, more of their fake news. I beg every sane American — please vote them out. I knew many who gave their life for the right to vote. Never has it been so vital to exercise that right.”
The video was posted on Sunday by Mr. Scavino on his personal Twitter account, which has nearly 1 million followers.
The original clip came from an interview that Mr. Belafonte did nearly a decade ago; the camera showed him asleep as the interviewer cut to him. But in the version Mr. Scavino posted, it was Mr. Biden on the other end of the interview, with his eyes closed.
Twitter added a “manipulated” label to Mr. Scavino’s post but did not remove it. The video in the post had more than 1.8 million views by Monday afternoon.
Mr. Belafonte spoke out after Representative Steve Scalise, the second-ranking House Republican, replaced a different video that Twitter had flagged as having been manipulated because the words of a progressive activist who was questioning Mr. Biden about funding for the police were misleadingly grafted together.
The activist, Ady Barkan, called out Mr. Scalise, the minority whip of the House of Representatives, on Twitter Sunday afternoon, saying he had “doctored my words for your own political gain” and demanding that he remove the video.
“I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts,” wrote Mr. Barkan, who has been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and speaks with the help of a computerized voice.
“You owe the entire disability community an apology.”
.@SteveScalise,
— Ady Barkan (@AdyBarkan) August 30, 2020
These are not my words.
I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts.
You and your team have doctored my words for your own political gain.
Please remove this video immediately. You owe the entire disability community an apology. https://t.co/N6G5RgMXlO
— Maggie Haberman, Matt Stevens and
Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, said Monday that she would subpoena Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general, for documents she said he had withheld from Congress related to mail delays and communications with the Trump campaign.
Ms. Maloney sent a memorandum notifying members of the panel of her plan to issue the subpoena, meaning it most likely will be delivered to Mr. DeJoy by Wednesday.
Over the last two months, many members of Congress have sought documents from Mr. DeJoy — a megadonor and Trump ally recently hired to run the Postal Service — concerning delays in election mail since he has taken the helm, the removal of postal service machinery and the process by which he was chosen to run the agency.
Democrats have raised concerns in recent weeks that Mr. DeJoy is interfering with the mail as part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to sow distrust in voting by mail ahead of a pandemic-era election in which mail-in ballots will play an outsized role.
Mr. DeJoy has yet to provide any documents to Congress since a hearing last week of Ms. Maloney’s committee, during which members grilled the postmaster general on widespread reports of dysfunction and slow mail under his leadership.
Ms. Maloney said she received a letter from Mr. DeJoy Friday night that said: “I trust my August 24 testimony before the Committee on Oversight and Reform clarified any outstanding questions you had.”
The subpoena “makes clear as a legal matter that the production of these documents is mandatory,” Ms. Maloney said in a statement.
Will you have enough time to vote by mail in your state?
The simple answer is: Yes, but don’t procrastinate.
In the 2018 midterm elections, more than a quarter of all rejected mail ballots — 114,000 votes — were not counted because they were late. But voters should have plenty of time to cast a ballot by mail in November, as long as they don’t wait until the last minute to request one.
Most states begin sending ballots to voters more than a month before Election Day. North Carolina, for example, will begin mailing ballots on Sept. 4 — a full 60 days before the general election. Alabama will begin on Sept. 9, and Kentucky on Sept. 15.
However, in 35 states, voters can request ballots so close to Election Day that it may not be feasible for their ballots to be mailed to them and sent back to election officials in time to be counted.
— Larry Buchanan, Lazaro Gamio and
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Veteran Republican political operatives have formed a new super PAC to support President Trump, committing to an initial $30 million in advertising in seven battleground states.
The group, called Preserve America, is led by Chris LaCivita, the Republican strategist who came up with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group behind an aggressive negative campaign against John Kerry with dubious claims about his military record during the 2004 presidential race.
Major Republican donors have been linked to the group, including Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire Las Vegas casino owner, and Bernie Marcus, one of the founders of Home Depot.
The multimillion dollar injection of pro-Trump advertising comes at a time when the president is being outspent by the Biden campaign on television. Last week, on the second day of the Republican National Convention, the Trump campaign halted all broadcast advertising in key swing states, though they bought some ads on cable networks. Over the next week, the Biden campaign is poised to spend $16 million on television advertising, while the Trump campaign is so far spending less than $870,000, according to Advertising Analytics.
The group’s plans were first reported by Politico.
The first two Preserve America ads indicate that they will be latching on to the issues surrounding the police and protests, a topic that has animated the president’s campaign recently and was a core message during the R.N.C. One ad features a former Los Angeles police officer emotionally recalling his daughter’s murder by local gang members, and another features a police officer’s widow.
“The radical left-wing mob is trying to destroy our country from within and Joe Biden is too weak to stop them,” Mr. LaCivita said.
Preserve America says that their early targets will be Georgia, Iowa, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.
A group of Republicans dedicated to defeating President Trump is going on the attack on Florida, preparing a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign aimed at undercutting Mr. Trump with moderate and independent voters in the country’s largest swing state.
The organization, Republican Voters Against Trump, has assembled parts of former Gov. Jeb Bush’s political operation to launch the offensive, which it has dubbed “Project Orange Crush.” Mike Murphy, an architect of Mr. Bush’s campaigns in the state and strategist for Mr. Bush’s 2016 super PAC, is directing the campaign, aided by David B. Hill, a former Bush pollster, and Tim Miller, a former Bush spokesman.
Mr. Murphy said in an interview that the group had already raised several million dollars for the campaign and had conducted polling and focus groups in the state. He said it planned to focus on several hundred thousand voters who could be the political tipping point in a state where elections are routinely decided by a percentage point or less.
Mr. Murphy said the group’s research had found a large number of moderate suburbanites and retirees, including along Florida’s western coastline and the Jacksonville area in the state’s northeastern corner, who were open to voting for Mr. Biden but needed some additional persuasion to break their typical preference for the G.O.P.
“There are cracks in the wall, but they need a few good sledgehammer blows,” Mr. Murphy said.
The Florida campaign is the latest of several aggressive steps recently by Republican Voters Against Trump, a group founded by the former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and Sarah Longwell, a Republican political strategist.
Earlier this month, the organization unveiled a video featuring Miles Taylor, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security under Mr. Trump, detailing what he called “dangerous” and “terrifying” behavior by the president.
The group’s strategists explained their choice to focus on Florida in a memo: If Mr. Biden were to capture the state’s 29 electoral votes, he would likely need to win only one other major battleground state, such as Michigan or Wisconsin, to deny Mr. Trump a second term. Their campaign is aimed at about 450,000 Floridians in the political middle who they believe are capable of deciding the race.
While some Democrats have grown frustrated with Florida because of the high cost of campaigning there and its persistent tilt to the right in state-level elections, the memo argued that Florida could help counter Mr. Trump’s efforts to polarize the Midwestern states along purely racial lines.
“It is no secret that Trump will use reckless and racially inflammatory language and grievance politics to try to rally his voters,” the memo said, adding, “Unlike those states, with large majority white populations, Florida’s electorate is far more diverse.”
The group said it would use a mix of television and online advertising, and Mr. Murphy said radio and direct-mail advertising would also be in the mix. The ads are slated to start after Labor Day.
“What we are going to do is go right at the suburbanites,” Mr. Murphy said, “and surround them.”
President Trump saw no improvement in his favorability rating after the Republican National Convention, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Sunday.
The survey, conducted on Friday and Saturday, found that just 31 percent of Americans hold a positive view of the president, basically unchanged from a poll taken before the party conventions. (Most other polls before the conventions had placed his approval rating considerably higher, often in the low 40s. More post-convention polling is sure to arrive in the days ahead.)
Despite the various speakers at the convention who extolled Mr. Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis, the ABC/Ipsos poll, which had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, also showed no bump in support for his handling of the outbreak. Thirty-five percent of respondents gave him positive marks on confronting the pandemic, on par with his numbers from July.
And while much of the convention was dedicated to tarring Joseph R. Biden Jr., the poll also showed no significant change in Mr. Biden’s favorability rating, which stood at 46 percent. He had received a boost after the Democratic convention; in early August, his favorability had been 40 percent.
For both the Democratic and G.O.P. conventions, about half of Americans reported watching at least a glimpse of them. While 53 percent of Americans said they generally approved of what the Democrats had said and done at their convention, just 37 percent said the same of the Republicans’ messages, according to the poll.
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Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III is trailing Senator Edward J. Markey in every poll ahead of the Democratic Senate primary in Massachusetts on Tuesday, and may become the first Kennedy to lose a race in the state.
He is struggling with idealistic young liberals and older, affluent white Democrats, the sort of voters who in an earlier era idolized his grandfather, Robert F. Kennedy, and his great-uncles.
Mr. Kennedy pointed to his strength with working-class Democrats and voters of color who are bearing the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic, all but scorning what he suggested was the hypocrisy of white liberals.
“For a progressive left that says that they care about these racial inequities, these structural inequities, economic inequities, health care inequities, the folks that are on the other side of that are overwhelmingly supporting me in this race,” he said. “Yet there seems to be a cognitive dissonance.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way — at least not in the minds of Massachusetts Democrats, who have spent a lifetime watching a parade of Kennedys win elections against little opposition. When Mr. Kennedy first considered challenging Mr. Markey last year, some in the party wondered if the 74-year-old incumbent would step aside for the 39-year-old political scion.
Instead, Mr. Markey, who was elected to the House before Mr. Kennedy was born, has harnessed the energy of the ascendant left and wielded his rival’s gilded legacy against him. And he has used his support from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their joint authorship of the Green New Deal to establish himself as the clear front-runner.
Mr. Markey’s strength illustrates the growing clout of progressives in the Democratic Party, particularly in states and districts that are heavily metropolitan and filled with well-educated voters. Each of the Democrats who have unseated incumbents in primaries in 2018 or this year did so in House seats anchored in cities or close-in suburbs, which is where most of the votes in Massachusetts can be found.
What’s so striking about the Senate race here, though, is that it’s the incumbent who framed himself as the bold insurgent.
The College Republicans at Arizona State University have called for an investigation of a splinter group, College Republicans United, after the smaller organization began a fundraising effort for Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old Illinois man accused of killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wis.
In a Twitter message on Saturday addressed to the university’s president the president of the A.S.U. College Republicans called College Republicans United a “rogue club that is in no way affiliated with us.”
“We stand strong with all Sun Devils in condemning their racism and bigotry because it’s not American, it’s anti-American,” said the A.S.U. College Republicans president, Joe Pitts. The A.S.U. College Republicans are a branch of the College Republican National Committee, a national organization that says it has 1,500 campus chapters.
College Republicans United did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Neither did the office of the university president, Michael Crow.
In 2019, College Republicans United had apologized after group chats involving some of its members were released revealing racist and anti-Semitic comments, according to The Arizona Republic.
Mr. Pitts said that College Republicans United, which bills itself as a “conservative” group, was formed in 2018 after its founders lost a leadership vote in the A.S.U. College Republicans, which formed in 1964.
The decision by the nation’s top intelligence official to halt classified, in-person briefings to Congress about foreign interference in a presidential election that is just nine weeks away exposes the fundamental tension about who needs to know this information: just the president, or the voters whose election infrastructure, and minds, are the target of the hacking?
The intelligence agencies are built to funnel a stream of secret findings to the president, his staff and the military to inform their actions.
President Trump has made it abundantly clear that he does not believe the overwhelming evidence, detailed in thousands of pages of investigative reports by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee and indictments of Russian intelligence officers by his own Justice Department, that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election, and is at it again.
One of the bitter lessons of the last election is that those defending against disinformation campaigns include not just the president and his staff but also state and city election officials; Facebook, Twitter and Google; and voters themselves, who need to know who is generating or amplifying the messages they see running across their screens.
And if they do not understand the threat assessments, they will enter the most critical phase of the election — those vulnerable weeks when everything counts and adversaries have a brief window to take their best shot — without understanding the battle space.
So it is no surprise that as soon as word leaked about the decision by the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, to give Congress only written updates about the latest intelligence, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. led the parade of accusations that Mr. Trump was paving the way for a second round of election interference.
“Nothing is more important than the security and integrity of our elections,” Mr. Biden, said in a statement on Saturday. “And we know that President Trump is unwilling to take action to protect them. That leaves Congress as the best defender of our democracy.
“There can be only one conclusion: President Trump is hoping Vladimir Putin will once more boost his candidacy and cover his horrific failures to lead our country through the multiple crises we are facing,” Mr. Biden added. “And he does not want the American people to know the steps Vladimir Putin is taking to help Trump get re-elected or why Putin is eager to intervene, because Donald Trump’s foreign policy has been a gift to the Kremlin.”
— David E. Sanger and
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A project from the National Domestic Workers Alliance called the We Dream in Black initiative on Monday morning released its “Unbossed Women’s Agenda,” which outlines economic and social policies that aim to transform domestic work and infrastructure to support not only Black domestic workers, but also their communities.
“Domestic work is the first way Black women’s labor has been used and exploited in this country,” Aimée-Josiane Twagirumukiza, the organizing director of the workers group, said in an interview. “The importance of having a Black domestic workers agenda is to address that — to address the foundation of how the society views Black women’s labor in general.”
Domestic workers are at the center of the coronavirus pandemic, facing heightened risks as they continue to work long hours, often for low pay. As caregivers and nurses, Black women constitute 28 percent of all women working in home care, while representing about 7 percent of the population.
The agenda wasn’t meant to be a recovery plan for the pandemic; it has been in the works for about a year. But the timing of its release coincides with the rising political debate over how to go about the economic recovery.
“It’s definitely something that we want to be anchored with an economic recovery plan,” Ms. Twagirumukiza said. She added that the pandemic had shown people that the economic recovery will have to focus on more than just on jobs and labor protections. “It also has to be coupled with other things in terms of a new care infrastructure,” she said.
Those changes, in the workers alliance’s eyes, include passing the federal Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, which was introduced last summer by Senator Kamala Harris of California, the Democratic vice presidential nominee. They would also mean enacting things like Medicare expansion, raising the minimum wage, instituting universal family care, securing better housing and passing an immigration overhaul.
“It’s really important now that we can reimagine what our economy looks like, that we can reimagine what work looks like,” said Jennifer Dillon, the director at the workers alliance. She called the plan an opportunity to “re-envision what work could look like for Black women who are oftentimes the first to lose income and the last to receive any kind of support or structural relief.”
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Joe Biden delivered an address in Pittsburgh, asking, “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is re-elected?” Follow the latest updates.
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