Joe Biden says President Trump still has no real plan to safely reopen America's schools
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden holds campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Wednesday blamed President Trump for the struggles by schools across the country to reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic, saying, "They are paying the price for his failures.”
"If President Trump and his administration had done their jobs early on in this crisis, American schools would be open and they'd be open safely,” Biden said during an appearance in Delaware. “Instead, American families all across this county are paying the price for his failures and his administration's failures.”
Biden added: “He's offering nothing but failure and delusions from the start to finish to American families and our children."
The former vice president -- speaking on the eve of his trip to Kenosha, Wis., a city ripped apart by unrest and violence over racial injustice following the police shooting a week and a half ago of Jacob Blake, a Black man -- said the mission of his visit is “to bring people together.”
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And pointing to President Trump’s trip to Kenosha a day earlier, Biden once again argued that Trump’s inciting the violence, charging that “this president keeps throwing gasoline on the fire every place he goes.”
Biden also emphasized that “police officers are good, decent, honorable, women and men. Pointing to the violence amid the national demonstrations over police brutality against minorities, he stressed once again that “protesting is a right and free speech is a right, but to engage in violence, burning, looting, and the rest, in the name of protesting is wrong.”
Biden’s speech – and his fielding question from reporters for the first time in over a month -- came after he and his wife, Jill Biden, a longtime educator, attended a meeting in their hometown of Wilmington with education and health experts.
The former vice president spoke as many parents and students throughout the country struggle with the resumption of virtual learning amid the pandemic — with others copoing with sudden school closures in recent days after suffering coronavirus outbreaks following reopening in-person classroom instruction.
“Protecting our students, our educators, our communities, getting our schools open safely and effectively, this is an national emergency,” Biden stressed. “But President Trump still doesn’t have any real plan for how to open our schools safely."
Biden spotlighted that he earlier this summer spelled out his own roadmap for opening schools safely, and accused the president of “starving schools of the needed funding, funding they need now.”
The Democratic challenger vowed that if he were in the White House right now, “I’d direct FEMA to make sure that our kids K-12 get full access to disaster relief and emergency assistance."
This week FEMA notified state and local governments that Washington won't use disaster assistance money to reimburse schools across the country for protective gear and cleaning supplies needed to safely reopen amid the pandemic.
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Biden also pledged that he’d be “working with the leaders of Congress now, today, to pass emergency packages for schools so they’d have the resources they need in order to be able to open safely.”
And giving Trump a failing grade, Biden asked, “Mr. President, where are you? Where are you? Why aren’t you working on this. We need emergency support funding for our schools and we need it now. Mr. President, that’s your job.”
Trump reelection campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh, firing back, noted that “what we didn’t hear was Joe Biden demand that [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi pass the $105 billion the president has requested to help schools reopen safely.”
While the Bidens were holding their event in Delaware, Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris of California teamed up for a virtual dicusision with Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota and parents in the crticially important battleground state about returning to school amid the pandemic.
And Jill Biden later in the day hosted a virtual conversation with educators, school employees and parents in North Carolina, another crucial swing state.
Ahead of his visit to Kenosha, Biden explained that he would holding "meetings with community leaders as well as business people and folks in law enforcement and to start to talk about what has to be done."
And the Biden campaign confirmed that the former vice president would be meeting with the family of Jacob Blake.
Video seen on social media shows an officer shooting seven times into Blake's back as he reached into his vehicle, where Wisconsin officials later said a knife was found.
Blake's young children were in his vehicle at the time. The shooting left Blake paralyzed, according to his father. The incident sparks days of protests and violence.
The president toured damaged businesses and met with law enforcement during his Tuesday visit to Kenosha, but didn't meet with Blake's family. Trump claimed on Monday that he wouldn't meet with them because they wanted lawyers invovled.
Unlike the president, who was urged by Wisconsin's Democratic governor not to visit Kenosha, Biden spotlighted that "there’s been overwhelming requests that I do come."
And he touted that "I spent my whole life bringing people together" and said that if he were president, "I’d be bringing people together in the White House right now" to try and ease racial tensions.
Murtaugh, responding, once again spotlighted that Biden didn't "condemn Antifa or call the rioters in our cities what they are: left-wing criminals aligned with the most extreme elements of the Democrat Party."
Asked by reporters how he intends to spend the record-breaking $364.5 million dollars in fundraising he hauled in last month, Biden said, "What I’m having to spend a lot of it on is to counter the lies by the president and his allies.
Biden also noted that he's looking forward to his presidential debates with Trump, which kickoff on Sept. 29.
"I’ve begun to prepare by going over what the president has said, multiple lies he’s told," Biden said. "What I’d love to have is a crawler at the bottom of the screen, a fact checker, when we speak."
And he argued that "I think that would make a great, great, debate if everything both of us said was instantly fact-checked by an agreed to group of people."
Fox News' Jacqui Heinrich contributed to this report
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