Pressed by Fox News, Biden contradicts self by saying Trump supporters ‘not a threat’ to US
US President Joe Biden has seemed to walk back his remarks that former President Donald Trump’s “MAGA” Republican supporters are a “threat” to US democracy, saying he does not consider any of the former president’s supporters to be a threat.
Biden had said in a fiery speech on Thursday that Trump and his “MAGA” quasi-movement represented “extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” And in a tweet on Friday, he said “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.”
On Friday, though, and when pressed by a reporter for Fox News, which has explicitly supported Trump in the past, the president said he did not consider “any Trump supporters a threat to the country.”
“You keep trying to make that case. I don’t consider any Trump supporters a threat to the country,” Biden said, in apparent contradiction of his earlier remarks. “I do think anyone who calls for the use of violence, refuses to acknowledge an election… changing the way you count votes, that is a threat to democracy.”
In his Thursday speech, Biden had been careful to differentiate between the “extreme ideology” of Trump and his followers and “mainstream Republicans.” But he had used strong language to describe the Trump camp and had said it “dominated” and “intimidated” the Republican Party.
“As I stand here tonight,” Biden said on Thursday, “equality and democracy are under assault. We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise. There’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.”
“History tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy,” he said.
In his Friday reply to Fox News’ reporter, he struggled to clarify his stance.
“Everything we stand for rests on the platform of democracy,” he told the reporter. “The people who voted for Donald Trump, support him now, they weren’t voting for attacking the Capitol, they weren’t voting for overthrowing the election — they were voting for a philosophy he put forward.”
Trump and his associates are the subjects of investigations into whether the former president attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Biden, including by goading his “MAGA” supporters to attack the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as the Congress was verifying Biden’s win.
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