-Every president for the past two decades,
Democrat and Republican alike, has declared war on drugs.
And each of them has lost that war and lost it miserably.
-A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage
over well-educated white in terms of the job market.
If I were starting off today,
I would love to be a well-educated black
because I really believe they do have an actual advantage.
-One of the issues that has become central
in the 2020 campaign
has been the state of race relations in America.
And right now you have the two leading presidential candidates
having to defend their own legacies.
-The moment that we find ourselves in,
in the wake of George Floyd's death,
is unlike what we have seen in decades.
-The country, if you just look at public polling,
is really shifting faster
than we've really seen in a long time.
-Do you believe there is systemic racism
in law enforcement?
-Absolutely.
-Why are African-Americans
still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?
-And so are white people. So are white people.
-We have two candidates for president
who are really men of another era,
and they're coming along and asking for people's votes
at a moment when we seem to be entering a new era.
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
, civil rights leader and Nobel Prize winner,
was shot and killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
-Because Joe Biden and Donald Trump go back so far,
they are really shaped in the way
they perceive what's going on in the country now by 1968.
For Trump, this is a time to look back at 1968
and recall that Nixon message of law and order,
of connecting with the George Wallace supporters.
-The people of our country are sick and tired
of the breakdown of law and order.
-We've got to reestablish respect for law,
respect for order.
For Joe Biden, that's also a formative moment.
-Joe Biden ran for the US Senate in 1972,
and if you looked at the way Biden ran,
he's a much more conservative Biden than you see today.
-I think it's useful to think of Joe Biden
as both a 1968 Democrat,
but also as a Clinton-era Democrat
that brings together the 1960s call for civil rights,
but also speaks to an anxious white population.
-Donald Trump grew up in Queens, New York,
in an ethnically diverse area about a mile or so
from the fictional home of Archie Bunker.
And you do get a sense, if you've watched that show,
what it might have been like for Trump to grow up.
-12% of the population is black.
There should be a lot of black families living out here.
Yeah, this is only a beginning, but I think it's wonderful.
-Wonderful, huh?
Well, let's see how wonderful it is
when the watermelon rinds come flying out the window!
-He went to virtually all white schools, private schools,
all the way through his education.
His business never had blacks in any position of authority
at any point throughout a half-century.
And he had typical, for his time in New York City,
in the outer boroughs,
attitudes that today would be considered downright racist.
-In 1973, there was an investigation
by the US Justice Department,
and they were investigating, as they did throughout the country,
whether there was racial bias in renting.
They'd send in a black person to see
if they could get an apartment,
and that person would be told no in many cases.
Then they'd send a white person in and see
if that person got the same apartment,
and that person was told yes.
The federal Justice Department sued Fred Trump Sr.
, Donald Trump personally, and their company.
In the end, he did settle this case.
From the government's standpoint, it was one
of the most significant racial-discrimination cases
that that department had brought.
From Trump's perspective,
because he had to do no admission of wrongdoing,
he paints it as a victory.
-Back in 1989, a jogger was running around Central Park
in Manhattan, and she was brutally mugged.
There was a massive police response,
and eventually five young black men were arrested,
later tried, and convicted.
-Of course I hate these people, and let's all hate these people.
-Donald Trump responded
almost immediately to the Central Park attack
with full-page ads in the New York newspapers.
-We don't know who did that crime,
and a court's going to decide who did that crime.
Were you prejudging those arrested?
-No, I'm not prejudging at all.
But if the woman died, I think they should be executed.
I think you should have the death penalty.
-Eventually, someone else not among those five confessed
to the crime, and the five were exonerated.
-Will you apologize to the Central Park Five?
-You have people on both sides of that.
They admitted their guilt.
-Going back to the 1980s, when Donald Trump
was establishing himself as a casino mogul,
he saw as direct competition and as unfair competition
the many Indian-tribe-owned casinos
that were popping up around the country.
Because of the tax breaks the Indian tribes got,
he went, as he often does, immediately to race.
-Maybe we say politically correct
or not politically correct.
They don't look like Indians to me,
and they don't look like Indians to Indians.
-The Liberals are finally agreeing
that we got to crack down on crime,
and the conservatives are finally agreeing
we've got to deal with the causes of crime.
And we have to do both simultaneously.
Every time Richard Nixon, when I was running in 1972,
would say "law and order,"
the Democratic mantra in response
was "law and order with justice," whatever that meant.
And I'd say, "Lock the SOBs up."
-Coming into the early '90s,
he decided that he really wanted to work with Republicans
on a crime bill that both Republicans
would support and President Bill Clinton would sign.
There definitely was a crime wave at the time.
But the main thing that he was working on
was getting more police.
-We have predators on our streets that society has,
in fact, in part because of its neglect, created.
They are beyond the pale, many of those people.
The bill ended up having 100,000 new police officers funded.
When you have that many more police officers,
that means you need more equipment.
He funded that.
And that means you need more jails
to incarcerate more people.
He funded that.
There certainly were elements in there for drug treatment,
for some social programs,
but he wasn't nearly as interested in that,
according to his own words on the Senate floor.
-We must make the streets safer.
I don't care why someone is a malefactor in society.
I don't care why someone is anti-social.
I don't care why they become a sociopath.
In this bill, we have drug treatment,
and we have other treatments to try to deal with it,
but they are in jail.
-He had police unions in his office
working to help write the bill.
He said to a police group, "You guys were in my office
for six weeks, and you guys wrote the bill."
And over the years, there's been a lot of criticism,
including from within his own party,
that this bill increased
incarceration rates tremendously.
-One of the results of the 1994 crime bill
was that it led to a rise in incarceration across the country
and specifically targeting people of color
for relatively low-level and minor offenses.
-As Donald Trump moved into potentially running for office
in 2000, he kind of rocked back and forth
between being a liberal and a conservative.
This is a man who changed his party affiliation seven times.
-What do you see as the biggest problem
with the Reform Party right now?
-Well, you've got David Duke just joined,
a bigot, a racist, a problem.
I mean, this is not exactly the people you want in your party.
-After Donald Trump's first couple of decades
in the real estate development business,
it's fair to say that he was something of a joke.
Well, along came an opportunity
to host a national television network show,
a reality show called "The Apprentice."
-For Donald Trump, "The Apprentice"
was a breakthrough not only to a much larger audience,
but to a much more diverse audience
that suddenly saw him not just as a caricature
who was a guy who appeared on "The Howard Stern Show."
-What if Ivanka was dating a black guy?
Would that freak you out?
-Um, you know, of course it wouldn't matter to me, right?
-Don't look over here.
-He was able to bring on black and other minority contestants
to be seen as someone who was an executive for all people.
He built a base that actually reached out
to racial minorities, a way that he'd never sought
to before and had never succeeded at before.
-For years after the passage of the 1994 crime bill,
Joe Biden often took credit
for what he considered its successes.
-We funded 118,000 local officers.
We expanded community policing across the nation,
and it worked.
Crime rates fell eight straight years.
-So by the time you come into Biden
being picked as vice president for Obama,
Obama praised Biden's work on that bill.
-Joe Biden brought Republicans and Democrats
together to pass the 1994 crime bill,
putting 100,000 cops on the streets
and starting an eight-year drop in crime across the country.
-When Biden was vice president, he told police groups that,
"Just as I gave you a seat at the table in my Senate office
writing the crime bill, you'll always have a seat
at the table when we deal with police matters."
-The death of Trayvon Martin and the shooting of Mike Brown
in Ferguson, Missouri, led Barack Obama
to speak out about race in ways that he previously had not.
-Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.
-And his worldview stoked some resentment
that had long been simmering.
-There was no charges by Justice against the white officer
who killed Michael Brown, but Justice did issue a report.
It was very critical of the Ferguson Police Department.
And there were police groups that were very upset about that.
-Cops have a right to go home at night to see their families.
And, two, all minorities, no matter what the neighborhood,
have a right to be treated with respect and with dignity.
-For Donald Trump, there's his personal view on race,
and then there's his public-persona view.
The informal Trump is someone who will always do
what will get a crowd riled up.
-Why doesn't he show his birth certificate?
They're rapists.
And some, I assume, are good people.
Very fine people on both sides.
-On the other hand, there is the Trump who believes that he can,
with the flip of a switch, be, as he puts it, presidential.
-You don't choose the right words,
or you say the wrong thing.
I have done that.
And believe it or not, I regret it.
-Trump had been talking for decades, literally,
about running for public office,
but no one really took him terribly seriously
until he began talking about Barack Obama's place of birth.
-You are not allowed to be a president
if you're not born in this country.
He may not have been born in this country.
-This was a classic case of Trump doubling down again
and again on a racially divisive kind of position,
one that had no foundation in truth and one that,
at some level he had to believe,
was connecting with some portion of his base.
And so fast-forward to 2016.
It was clear that he was using race as a way to appeal
to what he saw as his base.
-Donald J. Trump is calling for a total
and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.
I know nothing about David Duke.
I know nothing about white supremacists.
This judge is of Mexican heritage.
I'm building a wall.
-After being elected, most presidents attempt
to win over the voters
that did not back them in their original campaign.
But that has not been the case with Donald Trump.
-When you see these thugs being thrown
into the back of a paddy wagon.
I said, "Please don't be too nice."
If they don't like it here, they can leave.
I can name "Kung Flu."
-He has tripled down, arguably,
on issues related to racism and police violence.
-He has long cast himself as a law-and-order guy,
then a law-and-prder candidate, a law-and-order president,
and he has taken what he would call
a law-and-order approach to the protests.
-Do you think that right now the nation needs you
to express that same sort of comfort and healing
that some people need to heal?
-Right now, I think the nation needs law and order.
You saw these thugs that came along.
These people call them protesters.
-From the very earliest stages of this movement,
President Trump has been highly critical
of Black Lives Matter protesters.
-Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners,
when somebody disrespects our flag, to say,
"Get that son of a bitch off the field"?
-The president has responded to a lot of these protests
by trying to point to his record.
-You look at opportunity zones and maybe most importantly,
you look at criminal justice reform,
you look at prison reform.
I've done more for black Americans
than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.
-Are you ashamed of that bill? -Not at all.
And, in fact, I drafted the bill.
-Biden has found himself pushed on two sides.
He owes his political career right now to black voters.
-Thanks to all of you, the heart of the Democratic Party,
we've just won, and we've won big because of you.
-And right now, they are demanding things
that he has a hard time delivering on.
-Mrs. Clinton
said that the crime bill --
"We made a lot of mistakes with that,"
and she wanted to atone for that by becoming
the next president, like -- -She was wrong.
-Do you support defunding the police?
-No, I don't support defunding the police.
I will accept responsibility for what went right,
but I also accept responsibility for what went wrong.
-He wasn't terribly specific about what failed.
Now Biden actually endorses an effort to undo
some of the key things that he put in that bill in 1994.
-Today, he takes his place as the only
who has served alongside the first black president
and has chosen the first black woman as his running mate.
-What you have is a face-off between two candidates
who superficially seem like they are stuck in another time,
but who are struggling to adapt to this very fast-moving moment.
-There's no sense that the president's pitch
to African-American voters has shifted a lot of votes.
-Biden obviously wants to turn out the base,
but he also wants to expand the support for the Democratic Party
beyond what it was in 2016.
And he's been a bit effective at doing that.
-The concern with black voters from Biden's campaign
is not that they're going to support Trump,
but it's just that they'll stay home.
-This idea of massive generational angst and change
coming up against these older candidates
is one that really is going to both create tension,
but also perhaps create possibility
because it's clear that, after this election,
things are going to change in one way or another.