The U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security are setting up a joint operations center to investigate “left-wing civil unrest,” President Donald Trump said on Monday, as he accused Democrat Joe Biden of giving moral aid to vandals, Reuters reported.
Trump, hammering a “tough on crime” approach to curb violence in American cities gripped by protests over police brutality and racial inequality, said more than 200 people had been arrested in cities across the country, including 100 in Portland, Oregon, alone.
“In America, we will never surrender to mob rule, because if the mob rules, democracy is indeed dead,” Trump said.
Trump, emphasizing that “we need order,” spoke just hours after Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, said the President “can’t stop the violence, because for years, he has fomented it”, Voice of America informed.
Trump countered that Biden’s strategy “is to surrender to the left-wing mob.”
Earlier in the day, Biden, a former vice president, speaking in Pittsburgh, looked into the cameras during his remarks, which were carried live on the three main U.S. cable news networks, and said: “Ask yourself, do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really?”
Biden called for rioters and looters to be prosecuted and accused Trump of “rooting for chaos and violence” during the election season because he sees it as “a political lifeline.”
The trading of accusations comes nine weeks before the presidential election with Biden leading Trump in national polling, although the contest is tight in some key swing states.
On Tuesday, Trump is to visit Kenosha, Wisconsin, where protests turned violent last week after a white police officer shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back as officers tried to arrest him. And a white teenage vigilante claiming to protect businesses in Kenosha is accused of fatally shooting two people and wounding a third during a street demonstration.
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