Biden Calls Trump ‘Significant Contributor’ to Rise of Hate

(Bloomberg) -- Democratic front-runner Joe Biden lashed out at President Donald Trump for contributing to a climate of division and violence, arguing that the only way to change course is to defeat the president.

“When you give a safe harbor to hate from the Oval Office, it gives license to extremism all across the country. I’m not saying he’s personally responsible but I’m saying he’s a significant contributor to what’s going on,” Biden told donors at a fundraiser in San Diego, where his standard speech about his plans to defeat Trump became an emotional plea and a cry of frustration.

“I’ve not been this angry before today because you know what? Presidents’ words have meaning. No matter who the president is, no matter who he or she is, they’re the face of America,” the former vice president said.

The comments were Biden’s first to an audience since a mass shooting early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, left at least nine victims dead, just hours after 20 people were killed by a shooter in El Paso, Texas. The two incidents, coming on the heels of another mass shooting last weekend in California, have yet again brought the nation’s attention to gun violence, and prompted much of the field of Democratic hopefuls to call for new gun-control measures and a commander-in-chief who seeks to heal and not exploit divisions, as they say Trump has done.

Biden spoke after a day of introspection, which included attending Mass with his wife, Jill, at a San Diego church.

“We always talk about these things as if we’re going to do something about it. But given the tragic events of yesterday, the American people may be running out of tears but I pray to God they’re not running out of will, a will to do something about what we’ve seen,” Biden said.

“We don’t need more thoughts and prayers out of Washington,” he continued, in a nod to many statements from Republican lawmakers as well as from Trump. “What we need out of Washington is a strength and resolve that I have yet to see. There are escalating acts that are occurring not of madness but of absolute, absolute hatred.”

While Biden offered no new policy prescriptions, he pointed to his work with California Senator Dianne Feinstein to pass the assault weapons ban a quarter-century ago and vowed that if elected, he’d make sure it became law again. After the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, President Barack Obama directed Biden to lead a task force on gun violence and a push for congressional action -- including a new assault weapons ban -- which was ultimately defeated in the Senate. He did not say Sunday what would make the next push different.

“He’s infecting society and I might add the world,” Biden said of Trump, raising his voice to a near-yell in the marble-and-tile living room of a donor’s home. “There are a lot of issues but until we start to deal with the fundamental issue of restoring the soul of this country, none of the rest of it really matters.”

Trump spent the weekend at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, where his spokespeople refused to say whether he played after the shootings.

“Hate has no place in our country and we’re going to take care of it,” he told reporters in brief remarks before returning to Washington. Of gun violence, he said, “this has been going on for years.”

Many Democrats have blamed Trump’s verbal attacks on migrants and minority U.S. lawmakers, which they’ve called racist, for helping to incite the violence. Earlier in the day, California Senator Kamala Harris told reporters in Las Vegas that “words have consequences” and that Trump’s have been dangerous.

“The responsibility of being president of the United States is the responsibility of elevating public discourse, of challenging us to rise to our best selves, to speak to our better angels,” she said. She called the El Paso shooting an “act of domestic terrorism.”

The senator and former California attorney general also said on CNN that universal background checks are needed before gun purchases, along with a renewal of the assault weapons ban, which existed from 1994 to 2004.

Other candidates are also demanding that Congress enact stricter gun-control measures, and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren said Congress should cancel its August recess to work on them. Some people, Brown said on CNN, have taken Trump’s rhetoric as “as a sign to do terrible, terrible things.”

Warren said in a tweet that that white nationalism needed to be treated as domestic terrorism, and said that Trump was to blame for advancing “racism and white supremacy.”

--With assistance from Josh Wingrove.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jennifer Epstein in Washington at jepstein32@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Wendy Benjaminson

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