CHARLESTON, S.C. — Former Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday evening urged Americans to stand up to hate groups — and took direct aim at President Donald Trump, who he said “has publicly proclaimed the moral equivalency of Neo-Nazis, Klansmen and those who oppose their hate.”

Speaking at the centennial fundraising dinner for the Charleston branch of the NAACP, Biden said, “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.”


The speech at the Gaillard Center — across the street from the Mother Emanuel AME church, at which nine African-American churchgoers were murdered in 2015 by a white supremacist hoping to incite a race war — was one of Biden’s first since the fatal violence last month at a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The address was the latest, and most searing, in Biden’s series of denunciations of the president and the current tenor of politics. It’s been a rapidly escalating effort that far outstrips former President Barack Obama’s Trump-era political work — and which has poured fuel on the speculation that Biden is considering a third run for the White House.

Before Biden eventually ruled out a challenge to Hillary Clinton in late 2015, his theoretical bid was shaping up to be centered on the state and its large African-American population. A 2020 campaign would likely have a similar emphasis, said multiple Democrats who speak regularly with the former vice president and monitor his intensifying activity here.

Speaking at length about race for the first time since Trump took office, Biden told the NAACP group about his time working for civil rights in Delaware and added that in a recent trip abroad, foreign leaders asked what was happening to the United States under Trump.

“I just got back from Europe. Heads of state wanted to talk to me not just about Korea, but about Charlottesville,” he said. “The whole world saw the crazed, angry faces illuminated by torches.”

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And Biden, who has been increasingly public in his criticism of Trump, pointed to one of the president’s recent moves as particularly divisive.

“We saw the truth of this president when he pardoned Joe Arpaio of Arizona,” Biden said. “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. That we will not watch this behavior and go numb when it happens.”

He added: “We will not allow what’s happening along this landscape of America to be normalized, because we all know it represents the minority.”

Biden has stepped up his criticism of Trump in recent weeks. After the president’s equivocations in the wake of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Biden wrote in The Atlantic: “If it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now: We are living through a battle for the soul of this nation,” outlining the ‘we are better than this’ theme that has come to define his posture in the age of Trump. “[Trump’s] contempt for the U.S. Constitution and willingness to divide this nation knows no bounds.”

Shortly thereafter, he took to The New York Times to outline his foreign policy principles, again criticizing Trump while insisting, “America’s ability to lead the world depends not just on the example of our power, but on the power of our example.”

And when he launched a new institute named for him at the University of Delaware this week, he turned to the challenges of the modern economy.

So the specter of 2020 was inescapable during the popular pol’s second visit this year to early-voting South Carolina.

Since April, when he visited Charleston to honor former Sen. Fritz Hollings, he has re-insinuated himself inside the politics of the state, where he’s vacationed for decades. It’s a significant difference from other potential presidential hopefuls who have focused more on traveling to New Hampshire and Iowa.

In June, Biden recorded a robocall for unsuccessful congressional candidate Archie Parnell, and on Saturday he dropped by a small fundraiser for the Charleston County Democratic Party before the NAACP dinner, multiple Democrats told POLITICO.

For months, he has also been leaving his political footprint in the state by directly urging Democratic state Sen. James Smith to challenge Republican Gov. Henry McMaster — a close Trump ally — in 2018. The Columbia lawyer last week launched a website and video highlighting his service in Afghanistan in the first clear steps toward a run, after Biden used a series of phone calls in recent weeks to push him toward the race.

Mike Donilon, Biden’s top political aide, has also urged Smith to run, both in phone conversations and during in-person meetings in South Carolina. So has longtime Biden aide Fran Person, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress there last year, said local Democrats.

Now, much of the political work surrounding Smith’s ever-more-likely run is being handled by figures who — like Smith himself — were involved in 2015’s Draft Biden effort. And in-state political pros have been chattering about how a statewide Smith for South Carolina campaign email list could easily be transferred to Biden in 2020, giving him a potent tool and a possible leg up on other potential candidates.

Biden’s move to get involved with Smith at the ground floor is by far the most assertive of any potential White House hopeful in any statewide contest, and it’s South Carolina’s only statewide race next year. So even though Biden is far from mapping out a full electoral strategy for what’s likely to be a historically crowded 2020 field, the state is all but certain to play an outsized role for him.

“Iowa and New Hampshire are important and historic, but it seems like South Carolina is really shaping up to be where the rubber hits the road on who our nominee is, based on the last two contests,” said Democratic National Committee Associate Chairman Jaime Harrison, the former South Carolina Democratic Party chair, who keeps in touch with Biden’s team.

Noting the heavily African-American makeup of the state’s Democratic primary electorate — especially compared with Iowa and New Hampshire — Harrison added, “If a candidate comes to South Carolina and does really well, it really looks good for them as it relates to the rest of the primary schedule. And Biden has an established network here in South Carolina, with deep roots, good friends. It increases the difficulty for anybody else.”

On Saturday night, speaker after speaker joked about Biden 2020 as the crowd cheered, and state Sen. Marlon Kimpson urged him to return to the state frequently.

Nonetheless, though Biden’s daughter Ashley recently answered a Women’s Wear Daily question about Biden 2020 with “I hope so,” his political planning is moving slowly. His focus is now on putting the finishing touches on a book he’s written about the year surrounding the death of his son, Beau, in 2015, said a handful of Democrats familiar with his thinking.

That’s left a number of Biden’s top allies simply reading tea leaves about his intentions as he slowly starts re-inserting himself into the kind of political maneuvering typical of pre-presidential contenders.

“Haven’t heard jack,” said one top Democratic donor who spoke with Biden when he was mulling a 2016 bid.

But Biden has quietly stepped up his activity, working with a small group of political aides ahead of the November-to-December book tour — dubbed the “American Promise Tour.” It will take him to a wide range of battleground states.

Biden launched a new political group this spring that almost immediately collected contributions from top party mega-donors including Tim Gill, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Mel Heifetz, according to federal records. He has also been talking privately with House candidates all over the country about their campaigns, said Democrats who’ve been briefed on the conversations.

And Biden has been raising money for some candidates — like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey gubernatorial front-runner Phil Murphy — and recording robocalls for others — like Annette Taddeo, the Democrat running in a Florida state Senate special election this month. He’s set to campaign in Alabama next month for his friend Doug Jones, the Democrat running to replace Jeff Sessions in the Senate.

“It’s critically important that he has his voice out there,” said Harold Schaitberger, the influential International Association of Fire Fighters union leader who has long backed Biden, and who said he’s spoken with the former vice president multiple times since Biden decided not to run in late 2015. “It’s fairly clear to me, and I don’t think it’s a unique thought to many that have witnessed the Democratic Party over the last several election cycles, that it needs to do a better job of connecting with middle-class, working-class, union-class voters.”

Schaitberger’s union backed away from its planned Clinton endorsement while Biden was still considering his own bid.

“I don’t want to get ahead of my union — we have [an endorsement] process — but I’ve been supporting Joe Biden and Joe Biden’s been supporting the firefighters, our union, certainly my whole career, which began in headquarters in 1976,” added Schaitberger, asked about a possible Biden 2020 run.

But, he went on: “There’s nobody right now who would be any more energetic and connect any better on the national stage than Joe. That was our view years ago, and that could be our position again.”

