“FBI agents just doing their job as directed, facing threats to their own lives from their own fellow citizens,” Biden said. As he could have said but did not, the intimidation and threats have come almost exclusively from Trump supporters in the grip of delusions about the 2020 election spread by the defeated ex-president. “We’ve seen election officials, poll workers, many of them volunteers of both parties, subject to intimidation and death threats,” Biden said. That’s a reference to the threats from Senator Lindsey Graham and others of “rioting in the streets” if Trump were to face charges for taking classified documents home with him after he left the White House. “There are public figures today, yesterday, and the day before predicting and all but calling for mass violence and rioting in the streets,” Biden said. Biden’s sharp speech has only one justification: So much of it is true. The response from Biden’s Republican opponents has been hotter than mere tut-tutting. (An interesting indication of what Democrats are learning from their polling was that student-debt relief went unmentioned in Biden’s list.) To drive home what the speech was all about, Biden turned at the end from his defense of democracy to a reminder of his party’s record of accomplishments over the past two years: COVID relief, infrastructure spending, action to reduce prescription-drug costs, action to slow climate change. It’s wrong.”ĭavid Frum: Kevin McCarthy, have you no sense of decency? We can’t allow violence to be normalized in this country. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American. But that was a mere courtesy, because he almost immediately added, “There’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.” Biden presented the 2022 ballot question as a stark choice between right (his party) and wrong (the party that has become Trump’s party). He briefly drew a distinction between those Trump-loyal Republicans and the bulk of the Republican Party. So last night, President Biden followed the old adage: If you can’t beat them, join them. But the complaints were ineffectual Trump did it again and again. These deviations from past custom elicited some tut-tutting from a few who cared. At Mount Rushmore, he denounced “a new far-left fascism” that seeks “to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.” Accepting the 2020 Republican nomination on the grounds of the White House, he predicted that his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, would be “the destroyer of American greatness.” He gave a slashing partisan interview to Fox News from the Lincoln Memorial.
How dare Biden use this birthplace of the republic to speak that way about former President Donald Trump and his tens of millions of supporters?ĭuring his presidency, Trump repeatedly used places of national memory for partisan purposes.
The complaints from GOP leaders are loud. "The soul of America is our determination to get up and go to work everyday, provide for our families, to love our children, be involved in their education and ensure that this nation and its people always come first.President Joe Biden last night used the backdrop of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to accuse his political opponents of betraying American democracy. "The soul of America is not the ruling class in Washington, it is the law-abiding, tax-paying American citizen," McCarthy said. "What Joe Biden doesn't understand is that the soul of America is the tens of millions of hard working people, loving families, and law-abiding citizens whom he vilified for simply wanting a stronger, safer, and more prosperous country," McCarthy said. McCarthy criticized Democrats on inflation, crime and the border before demanding Biden "apologize for slandering tens of millions of Americans as fascists" after the president previously described the ideology being adopted by MAGA Republicans as "semi-facism." The GOP issued a preemptive rebuttal of Biden's remarks, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy speaking in Scranton (Biden's hometown) just hours before the president took the stage in Philadelphia. "For God's sake, whose side are you on? Whose side are you on?" a fired-up Biden asked.