Dan O’Donnell notices something interesting after a full week of President Biden blasting “MAGA Republicans” as a threat to democracy
Sep. 7, 2022
Perspective by Dan O’Donnell
What is a MAGA Republican? The question, while seemingly simple, defies an easy answer. Just ask President Biden, who has had a more difficult time defining his stated enemy than Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had in defining a woman.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” Biden thundered during his jarring, Mussolini-esque speech in Philadelphia last week. “They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live, not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.”
But what are they, exactly? Biden was careful not to lump all Republicans in with these clear and present dangers to America, claiming “not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.”
Like Senator Mitt Romney? No Republican could be more diametrically opposed to Trump than him, but when he was running for President in 2012, Biden told a crowd of black supporters that Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan (another Trump adversary) wanted to “put [them] back in chains.”
Sounds pretty MAGA, to be honest. And if even Republicans like Romney can’t escape Biden’s wrath, then who isn’t a MAGA Republican? Certainly anyone who supported Trump would be, right?
“Come on, look, guys, you keep on and make that case,” Biden said to reporters the morning after his speech. “I don’t consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country.”
Except, of course, for the 74 million of them who voted for Trump in the last election. Biden’s week of backpedaling has done little to assuage fears that he views approximately half of those he governs as his sworn enemies or, more accurately stated, enemies of the people.
“Look, extreme MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and our economic security, they embrace political violence,” Biden explained during a Labor Day speech in Milwaukee. “Think about it. Think about it. The definition of democracy is you accept the will of the people when the votes are honestly counted. These guys don’t do it.”
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere: A MAGA Republican is someone who threatens personal rights and economic security, embraces political violence, and denies the results of elections. Finally, after nearly a week, there is a concrete definition of Biden’s enemies of the state.
Strangely enough, they sound an awful lot like left-wing Democrats.
There has been nothing more damaging to this country’s economic security than Biden’s inflationary policies, and his unconstitutional vaccine mandate violated the personal rights of millions to choose for themselves the sort of medical care they wished to receive.
In just the past three months, a leftist terror organization firebombed crisis pregnancy centers, mobs of angry liberals illegally showed up at the homes of Supreme Court justices, and, in one particularly chilling case, a deranged pro-abortion crusader even traveled across the country to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh.
Stacey Abrams, the Democrat candidate for Governor in Georgia, still won’t acknowledge her defeat in the 2018 election. Neither did Biden’s own press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who also claimed that the 2016 presidential race was a “stolen election.”
Democrats in Congress formally objected to the counting of electoral votes following the 2000, 2004, and 2016 presidential elections—every single one that a Republican won this century. They routinely referred to both Trump and George W. Bush as “illegitimate” presidents.
Yet they, for some reason, aren’t nearly the grave threats to democracy that Republicans supposedly are. Biden’s sudden demonization of his political opponents may be thus seen as the cynical election-year ploy that it is. He knows his base is demoralized and needs a reason to go to the polls this November, so what better motivation could there be than casting the act of voting as saving democracy from those who seek its destruction?
Rational people recognize this as patently absurd, but then again, when it comes to Trump, Biden and his fellow Democrats abandoned rationality a long time ago.