By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
The White House is now faced with a conundrum — how
to make the case against Donald Trump as a quasi-Nazi while lowering the proverbial temperature after
his near-assassination?
Joe Biden’s Oval Office address calling for toning down
the overheated rhetoric in our politics was fine as far as it went, except that
it included no mea culpa, no assurance that he’ll try to do better himself, no
recognition that his political and media allies have been the worst offenders.
Over-the-top attacks on Trump haven’t been incidental
to the Democratic 2024 campaign, but central to it. How else to distract
attention from Biden’s woeful record and marked decline? This is what Biden was
getting at when he said — not knowing how it would sound soon thereafter — that
“it’s time to put Trump in a bull’s-eye.”
If Biden himself had been careful and responsible in his
criticisms of Trump and Republicans, he would have been rendered practically
mute the last few years.
Several years ago, he called the push for enhanced
voter-ID laws and the like in Republican states “the most serious test of our
democracy since the Civil War” and characterized it as a “21st century Jim Crow
assault” on voting rights. When voting reforms actually didn’t end American
democracy, he didn’t go back and correct the record.
The focus, of course, has been Trump. In his unsettling
and weird Philadelphia speech on “the soul of America” back in September 2022,
Biden fulminated, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism
that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
He urged Democrats, independents, and “mainstream”
Republicans to be “stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving
American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to destroying American democracy.”
That’s been relatively mild compared to how Trump has
been routinely characterized by Biden’s boosters as an American Hitler who will
end our democracy and assassinate and imprison his critics with impunity if
he’s elected to a second term. This isn’t the handiwork of fringe voices on
social media or YouTube, but some of the most respected and established voices
in the Democratic Party, from nearly everyone who appears on MSNBC to Hillary
Clinton.
Even the policy agenda that Biden and his supporters are
attributing to Trump, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is being called
“an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism,” as
one Democratic congressman has put it.
On top of this, Joe Biden’s Justice Department and his
political allies have repeatedly indicted Donald Trump in hopes of taking him
out politically and perhaps putting him in prison for the rest of his life, an
unprecedented legal assault against a political opponent that has enormously
raised the emotional and real stakes of 2024.
In his attempt to claw back from his catastrophic debate
performance, Biden assailed Trump at a rally in Detroit just days ago as “a
threat to this nation,” as his supporters chanted, “Lock him up!” And the
president won plaudits from his own side — this is what they want to hear and enjoy
hearing.
It has all added up to a constant, deliberate attempt to
keep the fear and hatred of Trump at a fever pitch and portray the fight
against him as literally existential. Who knows what, if any, effect this had
on Trump’s attempted assassin, who remains a blank slate.
Certainly, though, if the idea that Trump is just months
away from overthrowing the Constitution and establishing a fascist regime in
America is taken seriously and literally, it would justify any means of
resistance. Regardless, after the horror of Butler, Pa., even Democrats say
that things have gotten too vitriolic. They’ll just never admit their own
responsibility.
Maybe Democrats could say they disagree with Trump’s
policies and hate what he did after the 2020 election without invoking Hitler,
fascism, or any number of other bogeymen that are false and inflammatory? If
so, there’s a first time for everything.
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