In a speech today, the vice president portrayed this week’s events as a turning point for America—and as a binary choice in visions for its future.
© Provided by The Atlantic
Paul Spella / The Atlantic*
No other major-party nominee in history has called the political forces whipped up by a sitting president of the United States enemies of America. But that’s what Joe Biden did today.
“My fellow Americans, we’re facing formidable enemies. They include not only the coronavirus and the terrible impacts to the lives and livelihoods, but also the selfishness and fear that have loomed over our national life for the last three years,” Biden said, speaking from inside Philadelphia’s city hall. “I choose those words advisedly: selfishness and fear.”
Biden has warned for almost three years, since Donald Trump equivocated about the Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, that Americans are in the middle of a battle for the nation’s soul. That’s been the theme of his presidential campaign too. In speaking with advisers after watching the protests across the country last night, Biden was shaken. This wasn’t a metaphor anymore. This was a battle with batons and tanks and Molotov cocktails and hammers, going on in the streets.© Paul Spella / The Atlantic*
[Read: This is how Trump wants to be seen]
He didn’t get to today’s speech easily. Biden is so much an institutionalist that he had to be pushed into supporting impeachment last fall. He’s spent his whole campaign so far saying that he doesn’t want to talk about Trump, that he wants to talk about America instead. That was before the president had peaceful protesters tear-gassed to make way for a photo op of him holding a Bible in front of a church.
Today, Biden said that Trump has declared war on his own country, that he “has turned this country into a battlefield driven by old resentments and fresh fears.
