Former Vice President Joe Biden took shots at President Donald Trump on Saturday, calling him a “clown” who was allowing “Jim Crow” racism to return to the United States.
Biden kicked off his rally in Columbia, South Carolina with a string of warnings about racism and hatred rising under Trump’s presidency, in an effort to win support from African-Americans Democrats in the state.
“Folks, last year, 24 states introduced or enacted at least 70 bills to curtail the right the vote. And guess what, mostly directed at ‘people of color,'” he said. “You see it. We have Jim Crow sneaking back in. No, I mean it!”
Biden pointed to the elections in Georgia and Florida in 2018, where Republican candidates beat Democrats Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum.
“Why? Because they know if everybody has an equal right to vote, guess what? They lose!” he said.
He also alluded to the 2015 racist church massacre in Charleston, after a shooter killed nine African Americans at a black church. He reminded the crowd about Obama’s speech at the funeral and his decision to sing Amazing Grace to the congregation.
“I watched my buddy Barack stand up there, I watched him talk, and he talked about we have to find that Amazing Grace,” Biden said.
He recalled that day, noting that the people in South Carolina witnessed hatred that day.
“What we’ve never seen, when we have bad folks splitting people – Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, marching, chanting hate coming out of the woods literally with their torches, coming out from under rocks, and shouting the same antisemitic bile that was shouted and spoken to in Germany in the ’30’s,” Biden said.
He said that Trump was too divisive for the country, trying to clear his way into power.
“Any problem anybody has, he said, it is ‘the other,’ it’s the black community, it’s those folks coming across the border,” Biden said referring to Trump. “It just goes on and on and frankly, I’ve had it up to here.”
Biden repeatedly reminded the audience that Obama was his “buddy” and that he served with him as Vice President for eight years.
“By the way, he’s a hell of a guy, I worked with him for eight years, I watched him, he has enormous integrity, and nobody I’ve ever worked with was smarter, and he is a decent, decent, decent man,” Biden said. “And folks, I think he was one of the best president’s we’ve ever, ever had.”
“Above all else, we must defeat Donald Trump,” he shouted.
Later Saturday, the former Vice President attended a fundraiser where he referred to the president as a “clown.”
“There’s so many nicknames I’m inclined to give this guy,” Biden said to a supporter, according to a pool report of the event. “You can just start with clown.”
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