Joe Biden

"President declares half the country a threat to democracy," conservative radio host Erick Erickson tweeted after the president's speech on Thursday.

He described Jews in Germany as "parasites" and criticized democracies as "dishonest." On TV: Dark Brandon on his throne of human skulls." Some commentators have suggested the president could be playing into this meme now. In 1938, for example, Hitler addressed thousands of party supporters in the specially built site festooned with swastikas. [CNN](https://www.newsweek.com/topic/cnn) and [MSNBC](https://www.newsweek.com/topic/msnbc) love it. Or it's real." But there's no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. Biden's face had also been changed to look like Hitler, complete with mustache. Not every Republican, not even a majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. "I know because I've been able to work with these mainstream Republicans. [ Erick Erickson tweeted.](https://twitter.com/EWErickson/status/1565502737713856512?s=20&t=0d6XfrqUe8lp5AR-PSSPUA) Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.

Even on the day that President Joe Biden delivered his most jarring warning yet that democracy is in severe danger, Donald Trump teased how he might use a ...

Here as before, Trump is viewing the presidency as a tool of personal power to be used to reward his allies and to punish his political opponents. So far, Biden's tactic seems to be working as he grafts this strategy onto Democratic attempts to highlight the Supreme Court's overturning of the constitutional right to an abortion, which has galvanized liberal voters and enthusiasm in his party's base, and the recent passage of a significant climate and health care law. But this year, Trump effectively is on the ballot given his endorsement of many candidates whose main calling card is total loyalty to his false claims of voter fraud. He appears to be trying to turn the election into a Millions of people voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 because they embraced his anti-establishment creed or his hostility to globalization. But he soon flew to Florida to make up with the ex-President on whom he seems to think GOP hopes of a House majority and his dreams of becoming speaker depend. "They see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections. Those fights have raged intensely and often with ill-feeling in a deeply divided nation, but they mostly took place between two parties who fundamentally respected the electoral system. While he was speaking as America's head of state, his remarks also sounded like a campaign stump speech, delivered in a critically important battleground state that he will have visited three times within the span of a week by Labor Day. Multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no evidence that the 2020 was marred by massive fraud. It was a commentary on this era's fractured political times that the leader of the world's most powerful democracy would feel compelled to give such a speech at all. And Biden seems to have had a point.

President Joe Biden last night used the backdrop of Philadelphia's Independence Hall to accuse his political opponents of betraying American democracy.

Trump changed the rules of politics. Trumpism is not the repudiated past of the Republican Party. If Republicans gain control of one or both houses of Congress in 2022, and in almost any state where they wield power, Trumpism is the country’s near-term future. He could have added that those threats were encouraged when Trump released information about the search at Mar-a-Lago and did not redact the names of the agents whose job it was to execute the search. But that was a mere courtesy, because he almost immediately added, “There’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.” Biden presented the 2022 ballot question as a stark choice between right (his party) and wrong (the party that has become Trump’s party). Facing that reality is the way to prevent it from doing worse harm. Those fantasies have led two in five Americans to fear (or hope) that a second civil war could happen in the next 10 years, according to What once could be minimized as a recessive tendency within the Republican Party has become the dominant one. [slashing partisan interview](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/08/13/trump-lincoln-memorial-fox-town-hall/) to Fox News from the Lincoln Memorial. That’s a reference to the “We’ve seen election officials, poll workers, many of them volunteers of both parties, subject to intimidation and death threats,” Biden said. He briefly drew a distinction between those Trump-loyal Republicans and the bulk of the Republican Party.