On Sept. 20, a paranoid, drunk 41-year-old Biden supporter tragically ran a 19-year-old Trump supporter down with his car in North Dakota “because he had a political argument with the pedestrian and believed the pedestrian was calling people to come get him” apparently after the boy called his mother to come and pick him up. The man, Shannon Brandt, reportedly told the 911 dispatcher that the boy, who shortly before his demise called his mother again to say “‘he’ or ‘they’ were chasing him,” belonged to a “Republican extremist” group.
This came just a few weeks after President Joe Biden in a Sept. 1 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pa. declared former President Donald Trump, Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republicans and states that restrict abortions and mail-in ballots an extremist threat to the nation.
Specifically, Biden said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” He spoke again of their “extreme ideology,” distinguishing them from supposed “mainstream Republicans,” even though Trump’s favorability among Republicans almost universal, as it should be for a former Republican president, who led his party in office.
Biden tied Trump to the political violence of Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol thanks to Trump’s own ill-fated speech made at the National Mall that day preceding the 2021 Capitol Riot that led to Trump’s impeachment for incitement of insurrection—and acquittal on the grounds that he had a First Amendment right to make the speech.
To feel threatened, all one ever needed to have done was purchase a Make America Great Again red ball cap that Trump wore throughout the 2016 campaign. Many of them think they’re MAGA, and they probably loved Ronald Reagan, wave American flags, believe the Second Amendment protects them from tyranny and read their Bibles, too.
Supporting the President of one’s party in a reelection bid, as in 2020, is also a pretty low barrier.
Thinking the election might have been compromised when Biden only won by 43,000 votes in three swing states of Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona while Trump was visibly mounting legal challenges similar to Al Gore’s 2000 challenge of the results in Florida is a similarly low barrier.
Another election challenge that must not be forgotten is the insane 2016 challenge by Democrats on the grounds Trump was a Russian agent who was controlled by Vladimir Putin that led not merely to political violence—Steve Scalise almost died because of it at the Congressional baseball practice shooting by a Rachel Maddow superfan who thought Republicans were Russian traitors—but a supposedly serious national security investigation by the FBI, Justice Department and intelligence agencies that only led to Trump’s exoneration in the Mueller report, who could not find evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to hack the Democratic National Committee and put their emails onto Wikileaks. Thinking that was all BS is yet another similarly low barrier.
Here, the Justice Department was using political force under law, but it’s still force, against Trump to take him down. He was a sitting president, it was made up by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democrats, and when they found out it was made up, they kept going.
Trump, when leaving office, attempted to declassify the documents specifically related to that investigation, and once again, the Justice Department is using political force against Trump, and is still refusing to release the documents in their redacted form that Trump did declassify on Jan. 19, 2021 before left office, according to a public record of the Trump White House website retained by the National Archives.
These “elections were stolen” boys and girls who cry wolf allegations are pretty dangerous, aren’t they? Look at what’s happening.
In just the past 22 years, we have had six presidential elections, 50 percent of which, 2000, 2016 and 2020 all led to massive election challenges that further divided the nation—and according to Biden, not accepting the outcome of any election is tantamount to threatening the very foundation of the Constitution. There is harm to the nation, he says, when that is done.
So perhaps he needs to necessarily include, for all the same reasons, Hillary Clinton supporters from 2016 who thought Trump was a foreign agent and the mad men in the nation’s national security apparatus who foisted Russiagate on the nation as all political extremists who are dangerous. Look yourself in the mirror, Mr. President. America has lost its mind on a bipartisan basis in many ways.
Unfortunately, Biden’s speech, despite decrying political violence — but notably only right-wing political violence when it came down to specifics, ignoring lots of political violence in both directions whether it was the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots or ongoing street wars by rival political gangs in Seattle, Wash. and Portland, Oreg. — painted targets on his political opponents. He made them akin to extremist ideologies of the last century, calling them “semi-fascist” days earlier.
Biden is dangerously casting violence into a partisan context. We need a president who can calm those waters, not wield them. We need the Golden Rule, that each political party will treat each other the way it wishes to be treated, not the way it expects to be treated.
Here Biden lowered the barrier to finding potential extremists down to mere Trump supporters. That is why in a less publicized press event later that week, he attempted to walk it back a bit, saying he didn’t mean “any Trump supporter”. But by then the damage to our nation was already done.
Why did Biden walk that speech back? What had he done specifically to Trump supporters that he was now conscious of but didn’t realize while he was mad with power when he made his dark, poorly lit and terribly written speech in Philadelphia? Sounds like he had a guilty conscience, or perhaps he was just offended that any reasonable person would suggest his declaration of Trump and MAGA Republicans who support him are extremists meant that he was saying Trump supporters are terrorists.
Did Biden’s speech and mass media reporting about extremist Republicans play a role in Brandt’s psychology? How could they not? Isn’t that the point? What did Biden think would happen?
Biden incited the very “violence of faction” that James Madison warned of in Federalist No. 10 that Biden also appeared to decry. And now Biden knows it. A kid is dead. And to every parent out there, it could’ve been your kid. And it still might be if some miraculous force does not intervene. These are all giant red flags waving in our midst every day.
What is unclear is whether Biden knows that imprisoning the principal leader of the opposition party — as the Justice Department now threatens to do to Trump apparently over the documents it refused to release to the public after Trump declassified them — will only make it worse. That is the use of force, too, Mr. President. And if your advisors are not warning you of that, you need new advisors. These are dangerous combinations of circumstance that has our political life circling an abyss that will take not years, but decades to crawl out of should we fall in. It’s not too late.
Robert Romano is Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
