![]() Democrats are hoping, against history and most of the evidence, to turn the midterm election, once again, into a referendum on Trump, and, in so doing, to save their control over the Senate and maybe even the House. The country is clearly in for another period of electioneering in which playing to the fears of one’s supporters will be just about all that matters. But how dare Joe Biden say such nasty things about them for doing so? These howls of complaint might have been fun to listen to from the folks who routinely savage Biden as a wild-eyed socialist out to destroy freedom itself, if what they themselves were doing to the country were not so deadly serious.Īs an opening act of the fall campaign season, none of this bodes well. Storming the Capitol and defying the will of the voters in 2020 was totally fine. In the inverted logic of Trumpworld, theirs is the grievance that matters. “It depicts the president of our nation, as he took to the airwaves and spoke about his fellow citizens as if they were sewer rats.” Rick Scott, the Republican Senate campaign chief, tweeted the photo and dismissed Biden as a “raving lunatic” who “attacked half the country tonight.” Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, called it a “hate speech.” Over on Fox News, Tucker Carlson was very, very angry about the “blood-red Nazi background” and the Marine honor guard in front of Independence Hall, a setting that he termed a “complete outrage.” Even before Biden spoke, Kevin McCarthy-the House Minority Leader, whose slavish devotion earned him the sobriquet “my Kevin” from Trump-gave a prebuttal, in which he said that the President should “apologize for slandering tens of millions of Americans as fascists.” Vance, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, tweeted. “I can’t believe this is a real photograph,” J. MAGA Republicans seemed to think that the scary setting for Biden’s alarming message was somehow beneficial to them, and they soon began sharing images of the dramatic black-and-neon-red scene. ![]() Just hours before Biden’s speech, in fact, Trump himself bragged of giving financial support to some of the insurrectionists who have been charged by the Justice Department, and told an interviewer that he was considering offering blanket pardons to the January 6th defendants, should he be reëlected in 2024. I suspect that few will remember Biden’s words on Thursday night, however, as much as they will think of the ominous setting-the front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall at night, with dramatic red floodlights as the backdrop for the President while he spoke in dire terms about the possibility of political violence from the Trumpists who still refuse to concede Trump’s 2020 defeat, and who celebrate the violent mob that stormed the Capitol in hopes of overturning it.
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