Biden in SC denounces hate groups that ‘this president can’t’

Former Vice President Joe Biden used a Saturday speech to one of South Carolina’s oldest civil rights organizations to directly challenge President Donald Trump’s approach to racism.

“This is a moment for this nation to declare what this president can’t with any clarity, consistency or vision: There is no place in America for hate groups,” Biden said in remarks to the Charleston NAACP, as reported by Politico.

Biden was speaking at the NAACP branch’s annual fundraiser. He used the occasion to criticize Trump’s response to violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, something Biden said other world leaders have raised with him since the August event.

After one woman died when a car drove into a group protesting the white nationalists, Trump blamed the violence on “many sides” in Charlottesville, and said the rally-goers included some “very fine people.”

“It’s moments like these that each of us has to stand up and declare with conviction and moral clarity that the Klan, white supremacists, neo-Nazis will never be allowed to march in the main street of American life,” Biden said. “That we will not watch this behavior and go numb when it happens.”

Biden also paid tribute to the victims of the 2015 racially-motivated church shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, near the Gaillard Center where Biden was speaking.

Biden’s comments will fuel speculation about whether or not the former Democratic VP is planning a run for the White House in 2020, after he decided to sit out the 2016 election.

South Carolina will be one of the first primary states in 2020, and Biden has vacationed on Kiawah Island for years.