‘Absurd’: Joe Biden’s big misstep on Donald Trump

The US President and his Democratic Party always paint Trump as the evil causing division, failing to notice one crucial mistake they are making.

COMMENT

The idea of shooting a political candidate sounds stupid in Australia.

We’re just not that politically engaged – certainly not in the same way as the United States.

No one here would really care enough to pick up a rifle and attempt to take out a Prime Minister or Opposition Leader.

But politics is like sport to Americans. They nail their blue or red colours to the mast with pride.

And that interest is healthy for democracy – but it can also lead to the kind of crazed assassination attempt we saw on the weekend.

So divided is America politically that a young man tried to kill a former – and likely to be returned – president in Donald Trump.

It’s all good and well for President Joe Biden to call for the temperature to be turned down but it is Mr Biden and his Democratic Party that has driven most of the division.

They have always tried to blame it on Trump.

He, they claim, is the evil causing division.

But it is casting Trump as evil that actually causes the division.

Donald Trump looks on during the second day of the Republican National Convention on July 16. Picture: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images North America via AFP

The Democrats are so righteously convinced of their ideology that they have set the contest as one of good versus evil.

And when you’re fighting evil, then almost anything can be justified.

Trump has been compared to Hitler, with The New Republic magazine last month publishing a front page with Trump’s face morphed with Hitler’s.

The New Republic cover June 2024 Trump with a Hitler moustache, over the headline: “American fascism: what it would look like”.

He’s been compared to a dictator. Robert De Niro in May claimed that if Trump were elected in November he would “never leave” – it would be the end of elections and democracy in the US.

Mr Biden told donors, after his disastrous debate, that it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye”.

He posted to X this month that “Donald Trump vows to be a dictator on day one”, a gross misrepresentation of a joking response he gave in an interview, and that “we must stop him”.

A bullet could have stopped him dead.

Mr Biden has repeatedly claimed that “Donald Trump will destroy our democracy” and that “this race is about our freedom – it’s about our democracy”.

He claimed in the CNN debate that anyone who exercised their democratic right to vote for Trump in a democratic election was anti-democracy.

It is all patently absurd.

Biden said in the CNN debate that those who voted for Trump in a democratic election were anti-democracy. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP

But is it any wonder, with this kind of inflammatory rhetoric, that America is a divided country in which a lunatic tried to kill a presidential candidate?

Trump has never sought to divide America. His entire platform, from the beginning, was about making America great again – not splitting it in half.

His crime, the thing that has made him such an evil, Hilter-esque dictator, was to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by pointing out the divisions in the US caused by ruling elites deliberately ignoring the needs and concerns of ordinary Americans to further their own ends.

And Clinton proved the division she and her cronies had created when she referred to Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” – people for whom she had no time or regard.

Divide, divide, divide.

And now Mr Biden has the gall to say, with a straight face, that we need to turn down the heat.

You turned the heat up full bore and acted all surprised when it caused a fire.

US President Joe Biden turned up the heat and is now asking for it to be turned down. Picture: Samuel Corum/AFP

They claimed Trump would destroy democracy.

But, ironically, killing him would have done more to destroy American democracy than anything Trump could ever do.