Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden speaks in Wilmington, Delaware, July 14, 2020 (Patrick Semansky/AP)

Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden sets out a plan for environmental protection and rebuilding the economy.

Trump responds with a rant in a hastily-called White House press appearance.

Speaking in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden offered a $2 trillion, four-year program linking the need to deal with climate change with investment in infrastructure.

Climate change is a challenge that’s going to define our American future. I know meeting the challenge will be a once in a lifetime opportunity to jolt new life into our economy, strengthen our global leadership, protect our planet…. We’re not just going to tinker around the edges. We’re going to make historic investments that will seize the opportunity to meet this moment in history.

Plans include expansion of high-speed rail, building of electric cars, and a large increase in the use of wind, solar, and other renewable energy technologies. Reliance on oil, coal and other fossil fuels to generate electricity will end by 2035, with a goal of zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

The Federal Government will put $400 billion into the federal purchase of clean energy technologies to accelerate research development “on a scale well beyond the Apollo [space] program”. Tax credits and grants will accelerate production of solar and wind energy.

The plan aims to create 1 million new auto industry jobs through electric-vehicle manufacturing, and there is a large investment in zero-emission public transit. Four million buildings will be retrofitted for energy efficiency, and 250,000 jobs cretaed “plugging abandoned oil and natural gas wells and reclaiming abandoned coal, hardrock, and uranium mines”.

Biden said much of the benefit will come to disadvantaged communities: “We have to make sure that the first people who benefit from this are the people who were most hurt historically.”

He added that the Justice Department will launch a new Environmental and Climate Justice Division, “We’re going to hold accountable those CEOs of corporations that benefit from decades of subsidies that just walked away from their responsibilities to these communities, leaving the wells to leak.”

The candidate highlighted Trump’s denial of climate change — “When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is ‘hoax’. The word I think of is ‘jobs’” — and his ripping up of the environmental regulations of the Obama Administration, in which Biden was Vice President.

The Democratic nominee then pledged, “We’re going to lock in progress that no future president can roll back or undercut to take us backward again.”

Senior campaign officials said financing of the plan will include a rollback of the $1.7 trillion tax cuts in December 2017 and an increase in corporate taxes.

Trump’s 63-Minute Rant

Unsettled by the attention to Biden’s plan, Donald Trump quickly summoned the press to the White House Rose Garden.

The appearance was purportedly to announce an executive order to “hold China accountable for its oppressive actions against the people of Hong Kong”.

But Trump did not set out any substantive measures beyond the removal of any special economic and trade status for Hong Kong, in a passage that struggled for coherence.

Instead he launched his rambling verbal assault, often jumping between topics in the same sentence.

He assailed Biden, the Paris climate change accord, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, the European Union, immigrants, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the city of Chicago. As Florida set a US record — and the fourth-highest mark in the world — for daily Coronavirus cases, he praised a boat parade in the state.

In his brief remarks on Biden’s plan, Trump denied his own responsibility for infrastructure and claimed — without evidence — that the former Vice President’s support of the Paris climate agreement would have “crushed manufacturers” and “closed 25% of our businesses”, while allowing China to “pollute with impunity”. He confronted the detail of the plan with the sneer, “Let him define the word carbon, because he won’t be able to.”

Trump even tried the falsehood that Yellow Vest protests in France were about the accord.

Jumping around impromptu thoughts, Trump then claimed that Biden would get rid of windows and asserted that the construction of low-income housing meant the former Vice President “wants to abolish the suburbs”.

A passage on immigration descended into:

We have great agreements where when Biden and Obama used to bring killers out, they would say don’t bring them back to our country, we don’t want them. Well, we have to, we don’t want them. They wouldn’t take them. Now with us, they take them. Someday, I’ll tell you why. Someday, I’ll tell you why. But they take them and they take them very gladly. They used to bring them out and they wouldn’t even let the airplanes land if they brought them back by airplanes. They wouldn’t let the buses into their country. They said we don’t want them. Said no, but they entered our country illegally and they’re murderers, they’re killers in some cases.

Belittling Anti-Racism Issues

Earlier in the day, Trump belittled the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter marches after the May 25 murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis.

Asked why black Americans are “still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country”, he replied

So are white people. So are white people. What a terrible question to ask. So are white people. More white people, by the way. More white people.

In fact, while more white Americans are killed by the police overall, people of color are killed at far higher rates per capita. A federal study of lethal police force from 2009 to 2012 found that black people are 2.8 times likelier to be slain.

Trump dismissed the marches’ call for removal of the Confederate battle flag: “With me, it’s freedom of speech. Very simple. Like it, don’t like it, it’s freedom of speech.”

Asked about those who see a painful symbol of slavery, white supremacy, and violence against blacks, he insisted, “I know people that like the Confederate flag, and they’re not thinking about slavery.”

In another interview, Trump defend a white couple in St. Louis, Missouri who aimed guns at peaceful protesters. He lied, “They were going to be beat up badly, and the house was going to be totally ransacked and probably burned down.”