A primary reason President Biden soundly defeated a divisive, unpopular president was his optimism Americans could overcome any crisis by working together. But a responsible president also has to forcefully call out violent threats to American democracy no matter where they come from.
In a televised national address, Biden condemned the unprecedented assault on democracy led by Donald Trump and Republican extremists sabotaging voting rights in free and fair elections because Trump refuses to accept the defeat of his disastrous presidency by the largest presidential vote in American history.
“There’s 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,” Biden said. “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.”
Biden made it clear he believes most Republicans support democracy. “Not every Republican — not even the majority of Republicans — are MAGA Republicans,” he said. “Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.”
Trump’s Violent Supporters
Biden later expanded his definition of anti-American MAGA Republicans to include “anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn violence when it’s used, refuses to acknowledge that an election has been won, insists on changing the way in which you count the votes — that is a threat to democracy.”
In many states, respectable Republicans would rather not be associated with the embarrassing MAGA extremists Trump personally recruited or endorsed in their states. Republican nominees for governor in the closely divided swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona are full-fledged election deniers eager to award those states’ electoral votes to Trump in 2024 regardless of the election results. Wisconsin Republian nominee Tim Michels has engaged in a lot of double talk over whether he's ready to accept election results. That makes him a threat to democracy.
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Biden may be right that a majority of Republicans are not nutty rightwing Qanon conspiracy theorists hellbent on throwing out Biden’s 81 million presidential votes and reinstalling Trump in the oval office as president for life. After all, Republicans in the House and Senate fled for their lives just like Democrats from the armed mob Trump sent to the Capitol two years ago to stop them from certifying Biden’s election by any means necessary.
GOP in Denial
But Republican leaders in the House and Senate missed their chance to distance their party from Trump after the one-term loser was defeated by seven million votes. The perfect time to do that would have been on January 6, 2021, after Americans watched in horror as Trump’s violent supporters bludgeoned their way with flagpoles through more than 140 Capitol Police officers in hopes of hanging Vice President Mike Pence and bagging a few Senators and House members.
But Republicans were afraid of losing the support of Trump’s vicious supporters in the midterms. And honestly, many also were afraid for their own safety and that of their families. Trump’s mob really was ready to murder Pence for refusing to pretend fake Trump electoral votes submitted in states Biden won including Wisconsin were legitimate.
Republicans were once smugly confident of returning to power in the midterms in the House and possibly the Senate as well. Historically, the party losing the presidency almost always gains back seats in the House and Senate in the first midterms. But Republicans suddenly find themselves in a wildly unprecedented political environment.
Far too many Republicans believe Trump’s absurd lies Biden stole the election in a conspiracy between Republican and Democratic election officials to count millions of fraudulent Democratic votes. It’s saddled the party with terrible midterm candidates babbling Trump’s nonsense.
Threat to Democracy
Polls show the threat to democracy is rising as a top issue in the midterms. So is the destruction of the Constitutional right to abortion protected for a half century by the Supreme Court until Trump’s radical new justices abruptly abolished it ending women’s freedom to decide for themselves whether to give birth everytime they become pregnant.
Worst of all for Republicans, Trump has put himself on the midterm ballot simultaneously campaigning for the appalling candidates he’s endorsed while running for president again in 2024 promising “full pardons with an apology” for the violent insurrectionists being prosecuted for attacking the federal government on January 6.
We haven’t even mentioned yet Trump is in the news every day for taking hundreds of secret government documents home with him when he left the presidency and refusing to give them back. After Trump’s lawyers falsely claimed he’d returned all government documents, the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago and recovered hundreds of classified documents illegally in possession of a private citizen under the Espionage Act.
And later this month, the bipartisan House January 6 Committee is expected to resume their dramatic public hearings on all the possible crimes committed by Trump and his inner circle. That just might possibly have some effect on voting in the midterms.