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While Trump targets ‘anarchist’ areas, Biden to visit Kenosha to ‘be a positive influence’
Trump is keeping the focus of his re-election bid on the protests as a law-and-order issue, while Biden is trying to make it a vote on Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 epidemic.
Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, is expected to meet families of a black man shot by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Thursday. This comes when President Donald Trump has ordered a review of federal funding for cities that can be designated “anarchist jurisdictions”, mostly Democrat-run.
Trump is keeping the focus of his re-election bid on the protests as a law-and-order issue, while Biden is trying to make it a vote on Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 epidemic. In a major speech on Wednesday, he said the reopening of schools is a “national emergency” and the administration has no plans for it.
But responding to Trump’s stress on law and order and his attempt to tie Biden and Democrats to the violence, the former vice-president will visit Kenosha on Thursday and unlike the president, he will meet the family of Jacob Blake, the black man shot seven times in the back by a white police officer.
“We’ve got to heal. We’ve got to put things together and bring people together,” Biden said in Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday. “So my purpose in going will be to do just that — be a positive influence on what’s going on, talk about what needs to be done and try to see if there’s a beginning of a mechanism to bring the folks together.”
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Trump had mostly met law enforcement officials during his Kenosha visit on Tuesday and had offered them his full support in the face of criticism of their use of excessive force, which he had said were mostly because some officers “choke” under pressure.
Keeping the focus on law and order, the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to review funding to cities that have been in the grip of prolonged protests and block funds to those that are determined by the justice department to be “anarchist jurisdictions”, which have allowed the unrest to continue.
The White House order named a few of them — Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; New York City, New York; and Washington DC.
“Anarchy has recently beset some of our states and cities,” Trump said in the order. “For the past few months, several state and local governments have contributed to the violence and destruction in their jurisdictions by failing to enforce the law, disempowering and significantly defunding their police departments, and refusing to accept offers.”
This will not be the first time the president has threatened to block federal funding to states and cities that have disagreed with him. He threatened to withhold funds from the so-called sanctuary jurisdictions — that do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities — in March.
