Biden says Trump 'legitimises the dark side of human nature' in Kenosha speech

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Joe Biden said Donald Trump's remarks following racist violence in Charlottesville in 2017 had legitimised "the dark side of human nature" as the nation reels from police killings of black Americans and weeks of unrest.

During a community meeting at a church in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Democratic presidential candidate said he had been inspired to re-enter public office following the president's "very fine people" remarks, referring to demonstrations that included neo-Nazi groups and far-right violence against antiracist protesters.

"No president has ever said anything like it," the former vice president said at Grace Lutheran Church on Thursday. "It legitimises the dark side of human nature."

The president's comments "exposed what had not been paid enough attention to, the underlying racism that has been institutionalised" in the US, he said.

Mr Biden – who also met with the family of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old black man from Kenosha left paralysed after an officer fired seven shots into his back – listened to faith leaders, organisers, small business owners and first responders during the visit, amid an "inflection point in American history" for reform.

"I had an opportunity to spend some time with Jacob on the phone. He's out of ICU," Mr Biden said. "We spoke for about 15 minutes ... He talked about how nothing was going to defeat him, how whether he walked again or not he was not going to give up."

The meeting marked a rare, intimate moment in his 2020 campaign to offer a contrasting vision of the US to the president's "law and order" rhetoric, which Mr Biden has said only fans the flames of violence and exploits American vulnerability amid several crises for a campaign of fear.

Mr Biden arrived two days after the president's visit on Tuesday during a period of relative calm after the city was rocked not only by the shooting of Mr Blake but by the killings of two protesters by an alleged teenaged suspect defended by the president and his allies.

Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old Trump supporter from Illinois who travelled to Wisconsin for the demonstrations, has been charged with first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted first-degree intentional homicide and two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety with a deadly weapon.

Blake family attorney Benjamin Crump, who joined the family by phone to speak with Mr Biden and his wife Jill Biden, said they discussed the "disparate treatment of minorities by police" and the impact of selecting Kamala Harris as his running mate.

"The vice president told the family that be believes the best of America is in all of us and that we need to value our differences as we come together in America's great melting pot," Mr Crump said in a statement. "It was obvious that vice president Biden cared as he extended to Jacob Jr a sense of humanity, treating him as a person worthy of consideration and prayer."

In his remarks at the church, Mr Biden said the election presents "an enormous opportunity ... now that the curtain has been pulled back."

The candidate pledged commitments to funding for affordable housing and prison reform, including "mandatory rehabilitation" instead of punitive post-carceral conditions, to begin repairing communities and conditions that create crime. He also condemned looting and burning buildings that have become the focus of the president's campaign, painting visions of American cities in flames and under siege from violent mobs of "radical" protesters.

Demonstrators and organisers have pleaded with officials not to lose focus on what's central to the demonstrations – the victims of police killings and the structural issues within American policing.

"Regardless how angry you are, if you loot and burn you should be held accountable," Mr Biden said. "It cannot be tolerated across the board."

Among speakers addressing the candidate inside the church, Porsche Bennett, an organiser with Black Lives Activists Kenosha, put aside prepared remarks and spoke candidly.

"There's a difference between a protester and a rioter," she said. "We protest to get our voices heard, we protest to show that not just blacks are tired of what's going on ... We came together to get this community together as well, because we live here.

"But the changes we want have to [have] an effect," added the 31-year-old mother of three. "The actions we want are to hold these officers accountable for the same crimes that we would be held accountable to."

Mr Biden said, if elected, he would create a national policing council to "bring everyone to the table," including police, "and we're going to work it out".

"We've got to give a chance to change things," he said. "We're in a situation now where we can't let up."