Despite stepping aside in July and passing the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee, President Joe Biden is still on the job, and still speaking out about the danger Donald Trump poses to the nation.
“CBS Sunday Morning” will air a lengthy interview with Biden this weekend, but the network released a critical snippet of the interview Wednesday. The president issued a clear warning: Trump will not accept a loss in this election, and the results could be violent.
Asked if he is “confident” of a peaceful transfer of power next January, Biden was blunt.
“If Trump loses, I’m not confident at all,” he responded. “He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it.”
Biden reminded viewers of the foreboding things Trump has said during the ongoing campaign.
“All the stuff about ‘If we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath, it’ll have been a stolen election,’” he said. “Look what they're trying to do now in the local election districts where people count the votes.” Trump has boasted about the MAGA takeover of Georgia’s election board, and dozens of 2020 election deniers have positions in swing state elections offices.
The president’s message to Trump:
“You can’t love your country only when you win.”
Biden launched his campaign in 2019 because he wanted to save democracy from Trump and encroaching MAGA forces. The first two words he spoke when announcing his run: “Charlottesville, Virginia.” He was referring to the white supremacist march held there in August 2017, in which a counterprotester was killed. Trump’s declaration that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the march was the deciding factor for Biden.
“With those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden said in his announcement. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.”
He was proven correct after Trump refused to accept the 2020 election outcome, cooking up schemes in battleground states to overturn their results, filing suit after suit in the courts, and finally instigating a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, in a desperate attempt to stop Congress from certifying the election.
A repeat of Jan. 6 is weighing on Biden’s mind—and the public’s. A new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that most Americans see the election as “very important” or “extremely important” to democracy. The concern is particularly high among Democrats, with more than one-half of those polled saying this election is “extremely important” to the future of U.S. democracy.
The most recent Civiqs survey for Daily Kos reflects that concern as well. When asked, “What concerns you the most about a Donald Trump second term as president,” 39% cited the “impact it will have on America's democracy.” The next most concerning issue for voters was abortion, but only 8% said it was most worrying.
That’s why it’s crucial for Biden to keep reminding voters of what’s at stake. And with his approval rating rebounding since he stepped out of the race, his message can be particularly effective.
That sets up an effective one-two punch for saving democracy: Harris can run an energetic and forward-looking campaign while Biden backs her up and continues what he started back when he first took on Trump.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
