As is important to reiterate, President Joe Biden has never called for violence to be used against Donald Trump , nor did the incumbent president excuse or condone the assassination attempt that nearly murdered his 2024 challenger. Biden outright condemned the attack on Trump's life during his Oval Office address on Sunday night, urging people to "lower the temperature in our politics" and "remember, while we may disagree, we are not enemies," but "friends, co-workers, citizens," and "fellow Americans."
It would, of course, be nice if Biden could heed his own advice and remember what he cautioned the very next day.
During a Monday night interview with Lester Holt, the NBC anchor pressed Biden about his own incendiary language aimed at the former president, specifically Biden's call just one week ago to "put Trump in the bullseye" and his repeated decision to frame Trump as an existential threat to democracy.
Although Biden admitted it was "a mistake to use the word [bullseye]," he was defiant in maintaining that he was not responsible for his rhetoric potentially inciting violence.
"Well, I — I don’t think — look, how do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says? Do you just not say anything ’cause it may incite somebody? Look, I — I — I — I have not engaged in that rhetoric," Biden said.
When Holt followed up, directly referring to Biden's own plea on Sunday about dialing down the vitriol of our political discourse and his evident contradiction of that call, Biden was similarly unyielding.
What Biden clearly means when he calls for lowering the temperature is that only one side has to do it. And the grand irony of his contention is that he has done for four years exactly what he faults Trump for doing in the two months after the 2020 election.
When Trump relentlessly reiterated that the 2020 election was rigged, stolen, and illegitimate, enough people took such a declaration to its logical conclusion. Trump obviously did not call for violence or even vilify his opponent, but rather the integrity of the election itself, and a fringe of supporters took that seriously and literally.
Biden, if anything, has upped the ante, directly denigrating not just Trump, but also his supporters. Here is just a sampling of the rhetoric, as compiled by a follower of mine.
Biden has framed Trump and his followers not just as cheaters or morons or deplorables but imminent dangers to our 248-year-old democratic experiment. He has likened Trump to Adolf Hitler and sicced his own domestic surveillance state against his supporters as potential terrorism threats. In essence, Biden has been screaming from the Oval Office for four years, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome former president?"
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And progressive prosecutors, including those authorized by his own Justice Department, listened, racing to incarcerate Biden's top political opponent in the hopes of eliminating him from the 2024 election. Now that the lawfare attempt has failed, a 20-year-old graduated from the brute force of law to actual murder, and it logically follows: If Trump is an imminent, Hitlerian threat to a nation forged through violent revolution, why wouldn't an unhinged loner assume that he ought to respond with violence in kind?
Again, Trump did not direct the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol any more than Biden ordered his attempted assassination, but both used the power of the bully pulpit to paint a perceived problem in as dramatic terms as possible. Trump's vilification of a process was followed by a rabid mob trying to stop that singular process by force, and Biden's vilification of a person has been followed by a rabid maniac trying to end that person with violence.
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