(NBC)
Former Vice President Joe Biden launched his third bid for the presidency on Thursday, positioning himself as a trusted champion of the middle class eager to take the fight to President Donald Trump.
In a video released early Thursday morning, Biden said that "we are in a battle for the soul of this nation."
In the video's opening, Biden highlighted the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where during a large gathering of white nationalists and counterprotesters a white supremacist rammed his car into an opposition group, killing one person.
Biden noted that President Donald Trump said there were some "very fine people on both sides" in Charlottesville, where the white nationalists were protesting the city's plan to take down a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general.
"In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I'd seen in my lifetime," Biden said, adding that he believes "history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time." Read more