Biden: 'You Can't Sugarcoat It. These Are Dark Days'

Former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris appeared on Stephen Colbert's show on Thursday, while about 800 miles away, a tuxedoed Joe Biden took to the stage that same evening to speak at a National Bar Association event in Chicago. And Biden, 82, didn't hold back from airing his thoughts, with one person particularly on his mind: Donald Trump and his administration. Politico notes that even though the former president never mentioned the current one by name, "his intended target was clear" during the 20-minute speech. Some standout lines from Biden's appearance, per Politico, the Guardian, and the Chicago Tribune:

• A warning: "You can't sugarcoat it. These are dark days," Biden told the legal group of mostly Black lawyers and judges. "We are, in my view, at such a moment in American history, reflected in every cruel executive outreach, every rollback of basic freedoms, every erosion of long-standing, established precedent."

• An erasure: "We need to face the hard truth of this administration, and that it has been to [erase] all the gains we've made in my administration. To erase history rather than making it. To erase fairness, equality, to erase justice itself. And that's not hyperbole. That's a fact."
• Vulnerable Americans: "So many of you have fought to make this country live up to its highest ideals. Not since the tumultuous days of the 1960s has this fight been so existential to who we are as a nation, with marginalized groups so dramatically under attack."
• Immigration: "We see the apparent glee of some of our politicians while watching immigrants who are in this country legally torn from the arms of their family, dragged away in handcuffs from the only home they've ever known."
• 'Heroes': "It's not enough to honor the heroes who came before us. We need new heroes now."
• His age: "It's hell turning 40 twice."