Former Vice President Joe Biden revealed Saturday why he and former President Barack Obama kept their mouths shut for so long about Donald Trump’s performance as president.
“Barack and I agreed to remain silent for a while to give this administration a chance to get up and running the first year,” Biden said at an annual dinner held by LGBTQ rights group the Human Rights Campaign. “God forgive me.”
However, Biden said, he couldn’t sit back after the events of August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a man at a white supremacist rally drove his car through a crowd of anti-racist protesters and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
“We have leaders who at the time when that occurred, when these guys were accompanied by white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan ... making a comparison saying there are good people in both groups,” Biden said. “What has become of us? Our children are listening. Our silence is complicity.”
After the violence in Charlottesville, Trump infamously took no stand at all, claiming there were “fine people on both sides” of the protest and there was plenty of blame to go around.
Biden began publicly denouncing Trump last year, delivering a speech in October 2017 in which he said America was headed down a “very dark path.” Obama, meanwhile, made his first public statements against Trump earlier this month as he began campaigning for congressional Democrats.
Referring to Trump’s “both sides” comment, Obama asked, “How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?”
