If you’ve been paying attention for the past week or two, you’ll have noticed a shift in President Joe Biden’s rhetoric going into the midterms.
No longer is he running on getting massive spending bills passed or on helping curb the inflation he caused in the first place. Instead, he’s trying to tar and feather Republicans as extremists flirting with what he calls “semi-fascism.”
Now, Biden is about to go primetime with yet another “soul of the nation” speech — and, as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson pointed out on his Wednesday show, it’s merely a Hail Mary pass designed to distract from the failure of his policies.
Just so everyone was clear what we’ll see during Biden’s Thursday night address in Philadelphia, Carlson quoted and played clips of the president’s recent turn to divisive rhetoric.
“What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of extreme MAGA philosophy,” he said in one speech. “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy. It’s like semi-fascism.”
In another: “And we’re not going to let anyone or anything tear America apart. I’ll close with this. We’re at a serious moment in our nation’s history. The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security. They’re a threat to our very democracy. We must be stronger, more determined and more committed to saving America than the MAGA Republicans are destroying America.”
Actually, Carlson pointed out, Biden and his Democrats are doing more than enough to destroy democracy on their own.
“They’re destroying democracy, says the same politician who had the FBI raid the home of the man who is running against him in the next election,” he said. “They’re destroying democracy by voting for the wrong people. They’re attempting self-government, and that’s an attack on democracy.
Is Joe Biden unnecessarily divisive?
“It was all so crazy and over-the-top, so, yes, extreme that you couldn’t believe the White House press office would even try to defend it. It would have been better to announce that Biden must have had a stroke, apologize and then move on. Yet the White House seemed completely unashamed of what he said,” he continued.
Indeed, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has defended the president in media briefings, telling the press that “we have seen MAGA Republicans take away our rights, make threats of violence … And this is what we are talking about when … President Biden was making his comments last week.”
If this ridiculous pearl-clutching doesn’t get through to Democrat voters, maybe waving the bloody shirt of Jan. 6 will. On Tuesday, he claimed those involved in the Capitol incursion killed police officers.
“Imagine, Joe, if you turn on the television in Washington, D.C., and saw a mob of a thousand people storming down the hallways of the parliament, breaking down the doors, trying to overturn an outcome of the election and killing several police officers in the meantime,” Biden said.
“Really? We didn’t know that. How many police officers were killed, Joe Biden? Can you be more specific? Can you tell us their names?” he said.
“You can’t, of course, and he didn’t because there aren’t any. Not one.”
Furthermore, Carlson noted it was interesting that the president is now supporting police officers — considering “there was a time not so long ago when Democratic leaders told us that beat cops were Nazis.” That time, of course, was 2020, when it was all about defunding the police.
“Remember that? They were the Nazis. Joe Biden’s own vice president raised bail money collected through something called the Minnesota Freedom Fund in order to free people accused of committing violence against the police,” Carlson said.
“One of the so-called protesters that Kamala Harris helped spring from jail was a felon called Shawn Michael Tillman. He was out for three weeks before authorities say he shot a man to death at a train station.
“Now, shortly after Kamala Harris boosted the Minnesota Freedom Fund, Joe Biden rewarded her by choosing her as his vice-presidential running mate,” he continued. “So, at the time, Biden was much less concerned with violence against law enforcement. His party was encouraging it. Cops were getting ambushed all over the country.”
But now, because it’s convenient, Biden is pretending that the Capitol incursion and concerns about the politicization of the FBI are brazen attacks on all law enforcement — and expect to hear a lot of that on Thursday night. Don’t expect to hear a lot about the Black Lives Matter chant, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon,” though. That’s not something the president wants to cosign in 2022.
There was a time, as Carlson pointed out, where Biden put himself forward as the antidote to this kind of partisanship — in particular, during his inaugural address.
“Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this, bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting in our nation,” Biden said. “We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature, and so today, at this time, in this place, let’s start afresh.”
What happened? Joe Biden happened. He’s a failed president with a failed agenda and, from all appearances, a failing cognition. “We needed competence,” Carlson noted. We didn’t get it.
So, what we’ll get instead is incendiary rhetoric which casts Biden’s opponents as “semi-fascists.”
“Not all of these trends are Joe Biden’s fault. He had a lot of help over decades,” Carlson said. “But a lot of this is Joe Biden’s fault, and he can’t admit it, just as he can’t face the prospect of his own internal future as his 80th birthday approaches, so he externalizes it.
“He yells at you, not himself. You’re the problem. You’re the reason things are broken, your racism, your transphobia, your minivan. It’s your fault. You stood in the way of progress. You are a Nazi. We hereby declare war on you.”
This is the dispiriting reality of the Democrats’ midterm strategy: It won’t be the Biden agenda vs. reality. As much as I was looking forward to it, that’s a fight the White House apparently knows it’ll lose. Thus, they’re more than willing to have one half of the American voting public live in unwarranted fear of the other half, provided it’ll mitigate the damage to the left this November.
Biden’s divisive rhetoric will have lasting effects on the American polity, however. A politician can’t use the bully pulpit of the Oval Office to smear his opponents as “semi-fascists” without debasing the national conversation and increasing the temperature, to use the president’s own idiom.
It turns out Joe Biden only wants to “stop the shouting” when it makes him look good. On Thursday, expect a lot of shouting, name-calling, temperature-raising and demagogy.
“Uniting our nation?” Oh, please. To Joe Biden, that’s so January 2021.
