Upon taking the oath of office on the steps of the US Capitol just 20 months ago, Joe Biden solemnly pledged to keep his promise to America’s voters to “end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.”
On Thursday, September 1, during an eerily staged primetime political rally at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, Biden again paid lip service to the idea that he serves as a president for all Americans, “not a president of red America or blue America.” But the clear intent of his message to the American people was clearly the opposite.
The speech was a blatant effort to demonize his predecessor, Donald Trump, and his Republican supporters, because, according to Biden, they “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic…
“MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people,” the president warned. “They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country. They spread fear and lies told for profit and power.”
WHAT HAPPENED TO BIDEN’S UNITY PLEDGE?
During his inaugural address, Biden repeatedly pledged to work to heal the country’s political wounds. He used the concept of “unity” 15 separate times as his central theme, including the declaration, “My whole soul is in this: bringing America together, uniting our people, and uniting our nation.”
But during his address to the nation on September 1, Biden’s repeatedly sound an alarm, urgently calling upon voters to defeat Trump and his supporters to save the country. At 13 points during his 24-minute speech, Biden warned darkly that MAGA Republicans are a dangerous and subversive force, and that they are solely responsible for the fact that, “too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal.”
Biden made a brief but clearly insincere attempt to limit the broad sweep of his condemnation of his political opponents by stating, “I want to be very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.”
But then Biden deliberately erased that distinction by declaring, “there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.”
ARE TRUMP AND HIS SUPPORTERS REALLY A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY?
Biden then recited a laundry list of accusations in an effort to portray Trump and anyone who supports him of trying to undermine the legitimacy of American government and its guaranteed freedoms. “They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state, to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself,” the president said.
“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy… no right to marry who you love.”
In 2007, then-Senator Joe Biden’s published a memoir, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, in which he thanked the late Democrat Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield for giving him the best political advice he said he had ever received. Mansfield told him, “Joe, never attack another man’s motive, because you don’t know his motive.”
But in his speech to the American people from Philadelphia, Biden rejected Mansfield’s advice by assigning the most evil, cynical, and extreme motives to the clear majority of Republicans who, despite the relentless, continuing attacks on Trump today, still support the basic principles of his original “Make American Great Again” policy agenda.
BIDEN GETS UNEXPECTED CRITICISM
However, Biden’s harsh condemnation of such a large portion of the American people did not get the positive reception that he and his White House handlers had expected. As expected, Biden’s broad accusations against Trump and his supporters were warmly welcomed by the progressive commentators who dominate the MSNBC news channel and the editorial page of the New York Times. But Biden’s speech also drew unexpected criticism from some members of the mainstream media who had eagerly covered up for him during the 2020 presidential campaign, and then accepted without question the most bizarre White House explanations for the many failures of Biden’s policies.
CNN morning host Brianna Keilar noted that the use of US Marines as a stage prop for such a highly partisan political event was totally inappropriate. “Whatever you think of this speech, the military is supposed to be apolitical. Positioning Marines in uniform behind President Biden for a political speech flies in the face of that,” Keilar declared. Her reservations were echoed by CNN’s chief national affairs correspondent, Jeff Zeleny, another commentator who has long been part of the Joe Biden mainstream media cheering club. Both Keilar and Zeleny were immediately attacked for their criticisms by the self-appointed liberal censors who dominate Twitter these days — but the fact that they came forward to lodge objections at all was a worrying sign for both Biden and the strategists who crafted his speech in Philadelphia.
The Washington Post reported that all three major broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, had refused a White House request to preempt their normal programming in order to broadcast the Biden speech live during primetime, because even they thought its message was too partisan for a general audience, crossing the line for acceptable political rhetoric even in today’s harsh climate of partisan debate.
BIDEN WENT TOO FAR, JUST LIKE OBAMA AND CLINTON
The entire tone of Biden’s Philadelphia address recalled previous gaffes during election campaigns by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, which revealed their underlying contempt for their Republican political opponents.
In Obama’s case, it was the publication of his comments made during a private event in April 2008, in which he explained to Democrat contributors in San Francisco why he was finding it so difficult to win over working-class voters in the Midwest. Obama said they had become frustrated with their poor economic opportunities, “and it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
At the time, Obama was running as a newcomer against Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democrat presidential nomination. The Clinton campaign was quick to condemn Obama for voicing his elitist and disrespectful view of people of faith and those who live in small town communities. Obama’s comments, Mrs. Clinton said at the time, were “not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans.”
The harsh reaction forced Obama to publicly apologize for his comments, but they had already made a lasting impression that would continue to come up throughout the rest of the 2018 presidential primary and general election campaign.
Eight years later, Mrs. Clinton herself walked into the same political trap. In September 2016, speaking to an audience of liberal supporters at a presidential campaign fundraiser, she allowed her contempt for Trump supporters to show. “To just be grossly generalist, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” she said, as her audience laughed in agreement. “Right? Racist… xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it… those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America,” Clinton continued, fully revealing her previously well-hidden elitist prejudices.
CLINTON’S “DEPLORABLE” LABEL BECAME A BADGE OF HONOR
Clinton was also forced to walk back her comments, but the “deplorables” insult left a lasting impression that she could never explain away, and which would follow her throughout the rest of the 2016 campaign.
The angry response to Clinton’s comments energized the Trump campaign. His working-class supporters immediately seized upon the “deplorables” label and wore it as a badge of honor. It became a symbol of defiance against all the liberal candidates of the Democrat party, who like Clinton, had abandoned those working-class voters in favor of the identity politics promoted by the newly dominant “woke” progressive wing of the party, under the leadership of Bernie Sanders.
Both Obama and Clinton were forced to pay a heavy political price for revealing their prejudices, even though those took place during an unguarded moment while speaking with an audience of friendly and sympathetic liberal supporters.
A KEY DIFFERENCE: BIDEN’S ATTACK WAS DELIBERATELY PLANNED
In at least one respect, Biden’s speech in Philadelphia was much worse than the now notorious comments by Obama and Clinton. Those had been off-the-cuff comments meant by the candidates to elicit agreement from their likeminded liberal supporters. By contrast, Biden’s vilification and condemnation of his Republican opponents was not another slip of the tongue or unguarded moment, for which he has long been so famous. The deliberate attack on the motives of most Republicans was the carefully scripted and often-repeated theme of Biden’s 25-minute speech, which had been intended to instill fear and partisan hatred in a nationwide primetime TV audience.
The Biden White House was so stung by the immediate and unexpected criticism from some of his own more mainstream supporters that the president actually tried to deny the essence of what he had said the morning after he had said. When Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked Biden if he considers “all Trump supporters to be a threat to this country,” it was question that the president was eager to answer, because it gave him the opportunity to try to change the plain meaning of his words. “Come on, look, guys, you keep trying to make that case. I don’t consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country,” Biden said, in a brazen attempt to dismiss as a mere misunderstanding the central theme of his Philadelphia speech.
From that point on, Biden and his White House went to great efforts to reinterpret the speech as a call for help in saving democracy, rather than what it clearly was: a viciously partisan condemnation of the motives of Biden’s Republican political opponents.
Rather than keep his inaugural promise to unite Americans and promote greater civility and open dialogue, Biden has decided to add more fuel to the partisan fire by deliberately dividing the American people. He did not hesitate to condemn the more than 74 million people who voted for Trump in 2020. According to the polls, most of them still support Trump’s policies, despite any objections they might harbor about his conduct on January 6 or his ego-obsessed character.
There is nothing inherently wrong about Biden publicly calling out Trump for his personal faults, or disagreeing with his specific economic, domestic, or foreign policies. In fact, that is one of the traditional aspects of American political debate. But Biden’s approach in his Philadelphia went far beyond the usual campaign rhetoric.
BIDEN IGNORES THE ISSUES TO ATTACK TRUMP PERSONALLY
It focused on Trump’s motives and personality, and included little or no discussion of the specific pros and cons of the most important issues of concern to many American voters today. For the most part, it ignored the problems of inflation, recurring supply chain issues, growing crime and murder rates, disrespect for the institutions of law and order, failing students, and their angry parents confronting leftist union-dominated school boards over their woke curriculums and misplaced priorities.
Aside from liberals, most Americans have lost their tolerance for the creeping politicization of almost every aspect of American life, restricting freedom of speech, cynically manipulating or distorting the results of scientific research, and rewriting history to fit a leftist ideological agenda.
Last but not least is the largely successful campaign by self-appointed advocates on the left to demonize and then silence any open and honest dissent against the current “woke” positions of the liberal establishment. These range from the threat of climate change to the rights of parents to monitor and influence the education of their children. But the censorship and condemnation from the left is especially brutal whenever any such a dissenting view is expressed by Trump or any his supporters.
BIDEN TRYING TO REDEFINE THE MEANING OF DEMOCRACY
Biden’s Philadelphia speech was intended to legitimize those leftist totalitarian impulses by directly identifying them with the need to protect American democracy from the largely imagined threat posed by Trump and his supporters, and justify the extension of government control into every aspect of our personal lives.
Indeed, Biden is now trying redefine the very meaning of the concept of national unity under whose banner he was elected president two years ago. Instead of striving to develop a broad consensus of American public opinion in support of a basic set of shared goals and values, Biden now claims that “unity” means the required adherence by all citizens, enforced by the power of the federal government. That also includes whatever “woke” liberal and progressive standards are being dictated by the followers of socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who have been dictating Biden administration policies since Inauguration Day.
If American voters still want a unifier as their president, Biden has clearly now disqualified himself for that role.
TRUMP IS AN OPPORTUNIST RATHER THAN A FASCIST
Biden was also distorting the plain meaning of the word when he called Donald Trump a fascist, or semi-fascist. In fact, the key to Donald Trump’s success was his ability to spot a political opportunity that professional politicians missed, and then exploit it by manipulating the media to increase his power and influence.
Trump was successful in his 2016 takeover of the Republican party, and was able to defeat the deeply flawed Democrat candidate, Hillary Clinton, because he recognized that the elected leadership of both major political parties had deliberately abandoned the best interests of their traditional supporters. Trump recognized that these voters were looking for a new leader who was willing to serve as their voice and to commit himself to their interests.
Whether Trump personally shared those largely conservative he values adopted was irrelevant. Many believe they were merely a means to his ends, which was the accumulation of the ultimate political power of the presidency and the constant feeding of his insatiable ego.
TRUMP TOLD HIS SUPPORTERS WHAT THEY WANTED TO HEAR
Trump also had the communications and media skills to effectively transmit his message, which was carefully tuned to the priorities and frustrations of each of those voter groups, to convince them of that he could be trusted to do their bidding.
Each of those groups had their own priorities.
Right wing constitutional scholars wanted a conservative majority on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Advocates for law and order wanted a fence along the Mexican border to repel illegal immigrants and drug traffickers.
Many rural, small town and Main Street Americans wanted a vigorous defense of the traditional values of American democracy now under siege by the far left, including the right to live by their personal religious values.
Working class voters in the Rust Belt yearned for the return of millions of good-paying industrial jobs lost to China and other low-wage countries.
In each case, Trump was the only nationally prominent political figure willing to publicly commit himself to their cause. That alone was good enough to win their support. Whether Trump personally shared those priorities didn’t really matter to them, as long as he continued to speak and act as if he did.
MOST TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE SIMPLE BUT FRUSTRATED AMERICANS
The vast majority of Trump’s followers are not far-right wing extremists and racists — and never were. Most are non-college educated Americans with a simple, traditional belief in the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and the ingenious system of checks and balances embodied in the Constitution that are the true protection for American democracy.
They don’t want to overthrow the American form of government, or do away with the personal liberties it guarantees. On the contrary; they want the traditional MAGA values that Trump defined early in his 2016 presidential run, including more personal freedom and less government interference in their lives, lower taxes, fewer regulations, and the right to pursue the traditional American dream of success through their own hard work, skill, and personal achievement. In that sense, Trump and his followers are essentially antifascists. They want the government to stand aside and impose the least possible interference, thereby allowing the free market forces of capitalism and entrepreneurial energy to “Make America Great Again.”
Trump understood that he could earn the permanent, personal loyalty of the members of these voter groups simply by keeping the promises he made to them, something no other elected professional politician in Washington has done consistently for many years. Unfortunately, that is still a fundamental lesson from Trump’s rise that too many career politicians in both parties have yet to learn. It also helps to explain why, after years under continuous attack, Trump has been able to retain the allegiance of so many of his original grassroots voters.
THE LESSONS DEMOCRATS STILL HAVEN’T LEARNED
If Democrats really wanted to bring the working class back into their voter base, all they would have to do is listen seriously to their legitimate complaints, which elected Democrats — and most Republicans — have been ignoring for many years. But instead, Biden insists on insulting them and treating them like enemies of the country. Inevitably, that will only strengthen their support for Trump, because he is still the only one who is listening to them.
By the time Trump’s conventional political opponents in the 2016 campaign — first Republicans and then Democrats — finally understood his tactics, it was too late to stop him. He had created a dynamic personal image and forged political alliances with various alienated voter groups that enabled him to both defy and condemn the Washington political establishment (a.k.a. “The Swamp), and ultimately beat it at its own electoral game.
“THE SWAMP” STRIKES BACK
The Swamp refused to accept that defeat, and ultimately was able to defeat Trump in the 2020 election. But despite its unfair and illegal tactics, the Democrat-dominated Swamp — supported by the entrenched Washington bureaucracy, which is also known as the Deep State — has still not achieved its ultimate goal of driving Trump out of the American political system.
While Trump and his followers are being falsely accused of pursuing a fascist political playbook, most of the groups actually acting like fascists in America today can be found in the special interest and identity groups which dominate the progressive left. After having captured control over the policies of the Biden administration, including its supporters in the mainstream media, these groups are now actively implementing government, cultural, and business policies based upon the principle that any party or political belief system, except for their own, is inherently false, illegitimate, intolerable, and, according Biden’s Philadelphia speech, “a threat to democracy.”
In fact, it is the Biden administration and the leftist and identity groups pulling its strings who are the true enemies of democracy and freedom in America today, although most of them are so blinded by their own dogmas that they probably don’t consciously recognize that fact about themselves. But their desire for total state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think, makes that conclusion inevitable.
WHAT IS DRIVING JOE BIDEN
As to Biden’s personal motives for his shift in 2020 to adopt these extreme liberal policies, they are probably as simple and selfish as Donald Trump’s: a desire to cling to the power of the presidency. Through his long career in the US Senate, Biden always self-identified as a liberal, but was careful to confine his views within the mainstream of political dialogue of those times. He had never not crossed that line to adopt more radical progressive positions until he entered the 2020 race for the Democrat presidential nomination against a field dominated by candidates much further to his left.
So far, Biden and his supporters have been successful in their efforts to make Trump the single most dominant topic of the midterm election campaign, overshadowing the previously dominant issues of rising inflation and a faltering economy. Many believe that Biden is now focusing on Trump in an effort to avoid the political consequences of his many domestic and foreign-policy blunders.
Raising the false specter of an existential threat to American democracy is the most effect way to distract the minds of voters away from the out-of-control inflation and its harmful impact on the quality of life of hundreds of millions of Americans, for which Biden is directly responsible. It is also a way to divert attention away from the consequences of Biden’s many other failures as president, including the nationwide wave of deadly shootings and other crimes and organized theft, as well as a tidal wave of illegal immigration and a lack of border security resulting in a deadly epidemic of adult drug deaths.
Polls show that the majority of Americans disapprove of how Biden is handling each of those issues. Reading the polls, Biden and his White House handlers realized that to get angry voters to support their Democrat congressional candidates, they had to find a new issue more important than the others.
THE FALSE THREAT FROM TRUMP FILLED A POLITICAL NEED
The only issue that could fit the bill was to manufacture a potential threat to American democracy for that purpose. Donald Trump, who has been under steady attack for the past six years, was already set up as the perfect target to suit their purposes. As one longtime Biden confidant told a reporter for RealClearPolitics recently, Trump “embodies everything we need in a Republican candidate.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial described the strategy behind Biden’s Philadelphia speech as an effort “to out-Trump Trump by polarizing the electorate around the former President…
“If they can convince voters to believe the stakes in November are the future of democracy, the [midterm] debate will shift from inflation, rising crime and woke ideology. More Democrats might vote, and the party might hold Congress.”
A second Wall Street Journal editorial explained that “while Democrats claim to fear and loathe Donald Trump, they really can’t live without him. They need him around, they want him around, because they think he’s their ticket to remain in power.
“President Biden’s [Philadelphia] speech had a single political purpose: Elevating Mr. Trump to the center of the fall campaign. Forget all the high-minded talk about saving democracy, which is hardly in danger in a midterm election in which Mr. Trump isn’t even on the ballot. Democrats want to pretend the former President is on the ballot to campaign against as the great Democratic foil.”
SOME REPUBLICANS SAW IT COMING
According to an analysis by David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, “For the 2022 election cycle, smart Republicans had a clear and simple plan: Don’t let the election be about Trump. Make it about gas prices, or crime, or the border, or race… or anything — anything but Trump. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost control of the House in 2018. He lost the presidency in 2020. He lost both Senate seats in Georgia in 2021. Republicans had good reason to dread the havoc he’d create if he joined the fight in 2022.”
In an effort to avert the risk that this next election would become yet another national referendum on Trump’s leadership, Republican congressional leaders pleaded with Trump to keep out of the 2022 race. But that attempt was always doomed to fail.
“Show Trump a spotlight, and he’s going to step into it,” Frum observed, and it was naive for Republicans to pin “their hopes on the chance that Trump might muster some self-discipline this one time, some regard for the interests and wishes of his partners and allies.”
Biden’s Philadelphia speech was essentially a deliberate effort to goad Trump to put himself at the center of the current campaign. Biden dangled the bait, and Trump eagerly took it, putting the rest of his party on the hook with him and giving Republican leaders little choice but to pretend to like it.
TRUMP STRIKES BACK
Speaking at a rally in Wilkes-Barre for the Trump-endorsed GOP candidates for governor and senator from Pennsylvania two nights after Biden’s anti-MAGA address, Trump condemned Biden for delivering “the most vicious, hateful, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president, vilifying 75 million citizens.”
“He’s an enemy of the state,” Trump told the roaring crowd of supporters, and spent most of the rest of his speech airing his old personal grievances, as well as some new ones, while having relatively little to say on behalf of the candidates for whom the rally had ostensibly been organized — Dr. Mehmet Oz for Senate, and state Sen. Doug Mastriano for governor.
Trump labeled the recent FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home, as they tried to recover classified documents, an “evil and demented persecution of you and me.”
“The danger to democracy comes from the radical left, not from the right,” he said, as the crowd roared in approval.
Trump’s overheated rhetoric in response to a highly personal attack by Biden on his loyalty to American democratic principles and that of his supporters comes as no surprise; it has been Trump’s pattern throughout his public life. But Trump is also correct to point out that the Biden administration has been far more aggressive and ruthless at using its power over the federal government to advance its political and ideological agenda than Trump ever was during his four years in the White House.
BIDEN FOLLOWING A CLASSIC FASCIST STRATEGY
Inventing an existential emergency to justify suppressing political enemies on national-security grounds is a classic fascist strategy pioneered by Adolf Hitler when he had trouble gaining control over the German parliament (Reichstag) using conventional political tactics. Many believe that Hitler broke that logjam by having the Reichstag building burned to the ground in 1933. That gave Hitler the legal pretext he needed to declare a state of emergency, and abolish certain German constitutional rights which had been the last roadblock standing in the way of his complete control over Germany.
Hitler understood that to gain absolute power, he first needed to undermine and destroy the Germany’s weak remaining democratic institutions by deliberately fomenting chaos. In a sense, Biden and his fellow Democrats have been following the same script. While it is something of a stretch to compare the January 6 riot at the US Capitol to the torching of the Reichstag in 1933, the similarity of the political purpose to which it has been used by the Democrats and Biden to demonize their opponents should not be dismissed as a coincidence.
Indeed, the spooky stage setting of Biden’s Philadelphia speech, including its dark red themes and the US Marines flanking the shouting, gesticulating Biden calling for Americans to defend “democracy,” recalled for many the Nazi propaganda films of Hitler’s mass rallies staged in Nuremberg after he came to power. Those rallies helped Hitler capture the allegiance of most of the German people, and set the stage for the war Hitler launched in Europe to restore the honor of “the Fatherland.”
REDEFINING DEMOCRACY
Another key concept which Biden deliberately distorted during his Philadelphia speech was the understanding of the basic meaning of the word “democracy” when applied to American values. It appears that Biden, along with many other Democrats, now believe that anyone who disagrees with any part of their liberal goals and agenda, no matter how radical, are inconsistent with, and thereby pose a real threat to, American “democracy.”
Now that they have gained, by slim margins, majority control over both the White House and Congress, liberals think it is their ideological duty to impose their beliefs on the rest of the American people, and to punish all those who resist, or “fail to see the light.” This extends to the entire radical Democrat/progressive agenda of climate change, “green energy,” effective left wing social and media intimidation, forced wealth redistribution.
The guardians of left-wing ideological purity will tolerate no deviations whatsoever from their woke standards and guidelines based either on a person’s independent thinking or their traditional religious beliefs. They also have nothing but contempt for all those who espouse such traditional American values as hard work, frugality, patriotism, individual liberty, and the ancient legal concepts of private property that guarantee those rights — because, in the left’s view, they are all the product of the inherently corrupt and racist traditions of Western civilization.
THE LEFT’S TOTALITARIAN GOALS
The progressive left’s operating concept, that the central state defines the nation and that the chief executive of the national government has absolute control over both the states and their citizens, is the very essence of totalitarianism. Their view has no respect for the guiding principles laid down by the Founding Fathers of the United States. It dismisses the historical fact that America was founded as the voluntary union of 13 free and independent states, each one with its own demographics, economic interests, religious beliefs, cultural norms, and democratically elected state governments.
In fact, the central government in Washington was formed only for the mutual benefit of those states and their people. The Union was carefully designed to allow those states and their population to continue to live and operate as they each saw fit, maintaining a large measure of their original independence.
The US Constitution was written as a limited contract among them to provide liberty, national security, the rule of law, competent governance, and to encourage free and fair interstate commerce. In contrast with leftist progressive views, those who founded the federal government deliberately designed it with safeguards against the potential tyranny of the thin majority infringing on the rights of minorities, and to minimize interference by the central government with the lives of individual citizens.
BIDEN TURNING DEMOCRACY ON ITS HEAD
But in his Philadelphia speech, Biden implied that every aspect of Trump’s implementation of this original concept of American freedom now poses a threat to the left’s belief that its policies are now the sole legitimate definition of what they call American democracy. “MAGA” policy — tax cuts, opposition to Roe v. Wade, support for the Second Amendment, religious-liberty concerns, the current majority of conservatives sitting on the Supreme Court bench — now represents a threat. All are equally illegitimate, and thus a threat to “democracy,” too.
The radical left policy agenda that Biden has been actively pursuing since the day he took office is the exact opposite of the promises he made to the voters in 2020 when he campaigned for the White House. Those promises were the main reason Biden won that election; many of Biden’s voters chose him because they wanted more calm and normalcy after four disruptive rule during Trump’s presidency. But now, less than two years after that election, Biden has become a main combatant in the same divisive political war he was elected to stop.
BIDEN’S CONTEMPT FOR LAW AND ORDER
When running for president, Biden presented himself as the defender of the American order, in contrast to Trump’s presidential strategy of rule by fomenting chaos. Voters had a right to expect that once Biden won the presidency, he would govern by seeking consensus instead of confrontations, as he had promised. But since he entered the White House, Joe Biden has done no such thing.
Biden promised he would uphold the rule of law. But last year, he issued an executive order extending the federal eviction moratorium while publicly admitting he thought the order to be illegal. Then Biden ordered a federal vaccine mandate on his own authority, which the White House later conceded he didn’t really have. In each case, the policies themselves were clearly mistakes. The fact that they were eventually struck down by the federal courts only spared Biden the greater embarrassment of being forced to rescind them itself.
The greater significance of these illegal decrees is that they demonstrated Biden’s fundamental lack of respect for the federal laws that he is duty-bound to uphold. Biden has recently done it again, usurping Congress’s exclusive power over federal spending under Article I of the Constitution by cancelling the college student debts of millions of people in a brazen attempt to buy their votes in the upcoming November election.
DEMOCRATS WERE THE ORIGINAL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION DENIERS
Biden and the Democrats have also promoted a seriously distorted view on the issue of election security, because, from the outset, they refused to recognize the rational concerns over the Covid-inspired rule changes prior to the 2020 election.
Before the pandemic struck in early 2020, most states conducted almost all their balloting in-person on Election Day. Voting by mail was rare, and early voting was still a relatively new and controversial concept. But elected Democrats in states across the country used the pandemic lockdowns to change the voting rules, loosening the existing safeguards against voter fraud and enabling their political operatives to “harvest” large numbers of votes, prior to Election Day, from heavily Democrat voting districts.
No wonder Republicans became suspicious when they discovered that the new tidal wave of early and mail-in votes heavily favored Democrat candidates who had organized to take maximum partisan advantage of that opportunity, and then cried foul when late-arriving mail-in ballots tipped the scales against Trump and other GOP candidates in state after state, which ultimately resulted in Trump’s refusal to believe that his re-election bid had actually been defeated.
Democrats, on the other hand, insisted that Trump had no cause for complaint. One by one, the issue was decided in state and federal courts, each of which ruled that Trump’s accusations of voter fraud lacked serious evidence to support them. Even Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, said he had seen no evidence of fraud that would overturn the election outcome.
WHAT DEMOCRATS REALLY MEAN WHEN THEY TALK ABOUT FAIR ELECTIONS
Democrats then claimed that by merely by raising their doubts about the state vote counts, Trump and his followers were undermining American democracy. But that ignored the historic fact that it was Democrats, not Republicans, who mounted the first serious public challenge to the outcome of 2000 presidential election in Florida, which was ultimately decided by a less than 600-vote margin in favor of the Republican candidate.
It was Democrat Al Gore who first broke with long-standing precedent set by presidential candidates in previous close elections by filing legal challenges against the officially certified Florida vote count. The highly controversial issue ultimately had to be resolved by a controversial ruling by the US Supreme Court. But for years afterward, it was nationally prominent Democrats, not Republicans, who continued to publicly challenge the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential election.
Democrats also refused to accept the legitimacy of the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Democrats were wild with rage and inconsolable when it became clear late on Election Night that Donald Trump would emerge with a clear Electoral College victory. They did not hesitate. The morning after, the Clinton campaign launched a determined “resistance” movement to Trump’s presidency which was to continue unabated for the next four years.
Similarly, in the state of Georgia, the progressive Democrat candidate for governor in the 2016 election, Stacey Abrams, stubbornly refused to accept her narrow defeat by Republican Brian Kemp. Abrams claimed that her defeat was solely due to Republican voter fraud, a claim which has been widely supported by her fellow Democrats who to this day still routinely introduce her to their political audiences as the legitimate governor of the state Georgia.
To this day, when Biden and the Democrats talk today about “democracy” with regard to election, what they really mean is “rule by Democrats.” In answer to the question “was this election fair,” the answer you will get from Democrats will usually depend on who won. If it was a Democrat candidate, Democrats will say the election was fair. If the Democrats lost, then they will insist the election was stolen by Trump and his nefarious MAGA associates.
BIDEN’S SHORT MEMORY
In his Philadelphia speech, Biden also insisted that violence “can never be an acceptable tool. So I want to say this plain and simple: there is no place for political violence in America, period, none, ever.”
How short was Biden’s memory? Did he really forget that after the 2016 election, national Democrat party leaders, such as Congresswoman Maxine Waters, publicly encouraged their followers to harass and intimidate members of the Trump administration? And that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stood on the steps of the US Supreme Courts in 2020 and issued thinly veiled threats against the conservative Supreme Court justices for ruling against the liberals in a controversial Roe v. Wade related court case?
Then there was the open encouragement by Democrat state and local elected officials of the “mostly peaceful” riots organized nationwide by Black Lives Matter and antifa thugs during the summer of 2020. Those “mostly peaceful protests” left scores dead or wounded and inflicted $2 billion worth of property in downtown business districts in dozens of cities across the country.
Biden and his fellow Democrats have now launched a concerted effort to transform Trump’s highly effective 2016 “MAGA” campaign slogan into an ominous epithet. But nothing Trump said ever implied that his MAGA campaign was intended to be a threat to “the very foundations of our republic,” as Biden now claims it to be. On the contrary; Trump supporters have always claimed that it is an affirmation of the Founding Fathers’ principles of limited government and individual liberty that undergird the foundations of American democracy.
DEMOCRATS DON’T BELIEVE THEIR OWN ANTI-MAGA RHETORIC
There is also now good reason to suspect the sincerity of the claims by Biden and other prominent Democrats that MAGA extremists pose a serious threat to our government. If they really do believe that, why have these same Democrats cynically spent over $44 million in GOP primaries across the country to boost the candidacies of these same “dangerous” Trump supporters?
For example, in Michigan, Democrats gave money to boost the candidacy of far-right Trump supporter John Gibbs, who was challenging the incumbent Republican Congressman, Peter Meijer. Why didn’t they just stay out of that race, since Meijer had actually voted with Democrats in the House to impeach Donald Trump? Instead, they used Democrat campaign money to support Gibbs, who, as a declared MAGA supporter, they claim, poses a threat to American democracy.
Similarly, Democrats in California attempted to oust another GOP incumbent, Congressman David Valadao, who voted to impeach Trump, in an unsuccessful attempt to get Republicans to nominate in his place pro-Trump GOP primary challenger Chris Mathys.
In fact, it is clear that most Democrats really don’t believe their own anti-MAGA rhetoric. They have not hesitated to support allegedly dangerous but politically weaker MAGA candidates in close races if they believe that doing so will give their own Democrat candidate a better chance to win.
BIDEN DENIES CREDIT TO THE REPUBLICANS WHO STOOD UP TO TRUMP
Similarly, Biden and his fellow Democrats never properly acknowledged the key role played by many Republican officials who had the courage to stand up in the face of criticism by Donald Trump to say publicly they believed that Biden had won the 2020 election.
These include the Republican governors, secretaries of state, and legislators who resisted Trump’s demands to change slates of electors their states were to send to the Electoral College. They also include the federal judges appointed by Trump who followed the evidence and the law in first assessing and then rejecting Trump’s poorly based claims of election fraud.
Then there were the lawyers at the Trump White House and Justice Department, including then-Attorney General Bill Barr, who stuck by their professional opinions that Trump’s legal claims lacked sufficient credible evidence.
And, above all, there was Vice President Mike Pence, who could have submitted to the intense public and private pressure he was receiving from Trump to refuse to certify the electoral vote count that would confirm Biden’s victory. But instead, Pence courageously followed his instructions in the Constitution, carrying out the final step in the orderly transfer of presidential power which is the ultimate manifestation of the rule of law in American democracy.
Yet Biden has stubbornly refused to give Republican members of the “loyal opposition” the credit they deserve for having done the right thing for their country, at considerable risk to their personal political position.
PICTURE OF A PETTY TYRANT
What does this say about President Biden character? The answer is not pretty. Like most petty tyrants, Biden has a tendency to claim credit he does not deserve whenever events turn out in his favor. He is also an accomplished scapegoater, always eager to blame others to avoid taking the responsibility for his own policy mistakes.
For example, when gas reached $5 per gallon at the pump, Biden was quick to attack gas station owners for price-gouging their customers — instead of reversing his own anti-fossil fuel edicts. When his pledge to conquer Covid with “science” failed, he first blame “the unvaccinated” (clearly implying they were Trump voters) and then declared that his “patience” was “wearing thin” with those who refused to submit to his arbitrary mandates.
Since taking office, Biden has governed largely by edict, as if America were a one-party state. He habitually projects his own liberal extremism and ruthlessness onto his Republican opponents. He has pushed liberal policies calling for the brainwashing of vulnerable young children, refused to close America’s open border with Mexico to waves of illegal immigrants, distributed race-based federal handouts and preferences for his supporters, and refused to order a nationwide crackdown on the current nationwide wave of violent crimes and deadly drug abuse.
EXCEEDING HIS POWERS WHILE IGNORING HIS OBLIGATIONS
While asserting executive powers he admits he doesn’t really have, Biden has brazenly ignored his constitutional obligation to enforce the federal immigration laws on the books, or even to order his attorney general to protect conservative Supreme Court justices after their personal safety has been severely compromised. Biden has tasked his Justice Department to find novel ways around the Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade, in an effort to prevent red states from passing laws on the issue expressing conscience and preferences of those states’ voters.
There is a bittersweet irony in the Democrat claim that Trump is a fascist at heart, while Biden is protecting American democracy. The truth is just the opposite. When Trump was president, and clumsily tried to exceed his presidential authority, he was usually quickly thwarted, often by people in his own camp. But now that Biden is in power, he has been showing us how abuse of presidential power is really done. While Trump’s efforts were showy but often incompetent, the Biden administration’s efforts to exceed its actual authority have often been effective, usually due to the outside support from cheerleaders in the mainstream media, the liberal-dominated corporate giants of Big Tech, and many individual liberal agents working under the protection of the US security state.
So I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide on which side the truth really lies. Does a former president — and his frustrated supporter base — really pose a serious threat to American democracy, or does the true danger emanate from the president and his liberal masters who have been making the accusations, and using the power of the government they now control to demonize and ultimately silence their political opponents?
VOTERS MUST NOW CHOOSE
The current debate, at its core, is over the essence of American democracy. Is it to be increasingly dominated by the power of the central government, or the personal liberties and protections that were established by this country’s Founding Fathers more than two centuries ago?
Which side will the voters ultimately choose when the time comes for them to cut through all the media hype, accusations, and competing claims to assert their own definitive verdict on midterm Election Day this November?