by Rarely in American politics has a prominent presidential candidate made such serious accusations about a rival — warning that he is willing to violate the Constitution. Stating that he is eager to go after his political rivals. Calling it a terrible threat to democracy.
Those arguments come from President Biden’s speeches, including his powerful speech on Friday, as he criticized his predecessor. But now they are also being blatantly brandished by Donald J. Trump, the only president to try to overturn a US election.
Three years after the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol, Trump and his campaign are engaged in a bold attempt to portray Biden as the real threat to the nation’s foundations. Trump’s strategy aims to change a world in which he has publicly called for suspending the Constitution, he has promised to make his political opponents legal targets and he has suggested that the country’s top military general should be executed.
The result has been a barrage of recriminations from the leading candidates of each party, including competitive events to mark the third anniversary of Saturday’s attack on the Capitol.
Each man’s eagerness to present the other as an imminent threat indicates that their potential revenge this year will be framed as nothing less than a cataclysmic battle for the future of democracy, even as Trump attempts to twist the very idea to suit his interests. own purposes.
“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not about America, not about you,” Biden said Friday, speaking near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. “Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He is willing to sacrifice our democracy and come to power.”
On Friday night, at his own rally in Sioux City, Iowa, Trump responded by calling Biden’s comments “pathetic alarmist” and accusing him again, without any evidence, of using federal law enforcement to attack his political opponents. .
“They’ve weaponized the government and he says I’m a threat to democracy,” Trump said in disbelief.
The first maneuvers of Biden and Trump point to an election that will be fought on extraordinary terrain. While the economy, abortion rights and the ages of the candidates are expected to be central issues of the campaign, both argue that what is fundamentally at stake is whether the country’s nearly 250-year-old system of government endures.
Biden traveled near the historic site, where George Washington burnished his leadership credentials during the Revolutionary War, to highlight the nation’s long tradition of a peaceful transfer of power, which Washington set in motion by voluntarily resigning from office. The Biden campaign’s goal was to contrast that election with the actions of Trump, who has continued to falsely question the results of the 2020 race.
The president’s team described Friday’s speech as the first in a series of campaign events that would present the upcoming election as a fight for the survival of democracy itself.
As Biden approaches the final year of his term, his concerns that Trump could stoke more political violence have helped persuade him to make the strength of American democracy the central issue of his re-election, according to a former adviser.
The stakes are especially personal for Trump given the 91 felony charges against him, many of them stemming from his attempt to cling to power. He often defines threats to democracy as any circumstance that could jeopardize his path to the presidency, and has blamed Biden and his allies without evidence.
“They are willing to violate the United States Constitution at levels never seen before in order to win,” Trump said. saying during a rally last month in New Hampshire. “And remember this: Joe Biden is a threat to democracy, he is a threat.”
In an email sent to his supporters on December 14, Trump falsely claimed that Jack Smith, the special prosecutor leading the federal prosecution of the former president, “received an order from his boss: try, convict and sentence Donald Trump to prison.” . before the November 2024 elections.”
Mr. Smith is responsible for investigating attempts to interfere with the 2020 elections.
“You, too, could be imprisoned for life as an innocent man,” Trump warned his supporters in a Dec. 20 fundraising appeal.
In his attacks on Biden, the former president has often pointed to actions taken by the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine secretary of state to block Trump from the primaries in those states by citing a constitutional provision prohibiting those “engaged in the insurrection” of holding office.
Trump has correctly noted that Democrats have led such efforts to remove him from the ballot, but he rarely mentions that both decisions have been put on hold pending legal appeals, a sign that democratic institutions work and are not being undermined.
At campaign rallies, Trump called the Jan. 6 attacks “a beautiful day” and said the roughly 1,240 people arrested so far in connection with the riot were “hostages,” not prisoners. Nearly 900 have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial.
A Jan. 2 memo from Trump’s top campaign advisers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, made clear that the former president’s strategy would define his election bid.
“Please make no mistake,” they wrote. “Joe Biden and his allies are a real and compelling threat to our democracy. In fact, in a way never seen before in our history, they are waging a war against it.”
Of course, Trump has often relied on projection as a political defense mechanism, including a memorable debate moment in 2016 when Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had praised Trump because “ “He would rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”
“No puppet,” Trump quickly objected. “You are the puppet.”
As president, Trump complained about the rebelliousness of House Democrats as he led a White House often consumed by chaos. He was first charged after asking Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, to dig up information about Biden and her son, even as Trump accused the Biden family of unethical behavior in the Eastern European country.
More recently, the Trump campaign has projected the words “BIDEN ATTACKS DEMOCRACY” on screens at its rallies, and his team passes out matching signs to the crowd.
“It’s classic Trump to try to deflect from his own misconduct,” Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, told reporters before Biden’s speech on Friday. “The reality is that the people of Pennsylvania have shown through multiple cycles, in 2020 and 2022, that they see beyond that.”
Trump’s tactics have been adopted by his supporters, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who said this week that the Biden administration was “weaponizing the FBI to go after MAGA grandmas and veterans” while campaigning for Trump in Iowa.
“Democrats love democracy so much that they are willing to destroy it to supposedly protect it,” Ms. Greene told a crowd in Keokuk on Thursday.
Polls have suggested that voters still prioritize issues like the economy over concerns about democracy. But Biden advisers say his campaign data shows his supporters are concerned about the risk of political violence and that Jan. 6 remains a resonant moment for the Democratic coalition.
While Democratic voters appear distrustful of Biden’s age and relatively unenthused about his candidacy, they are firmly united by the idea that Trump has broken the public’s trust.
In a New York Times/Siena College poll last month, 93 percent of likely Democratic voters said they believed Trump had committed serious federal crimes. Eighty-seven percent of Democrats said Trump had been impeached primarily because prosecutors believed he had committed crimes, not because of political motivations.
Both figures surpassed the 79 percent of Democrats who said they approved of Biden’s performance as president.
Focusing on democracy “is the most prominent way to capture the violence and extremism that MAGA represents,” said Navin Nayak, a Democratic strategist and president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “This encourages the belief that the threat is still real and that there is a future threat of violence.”
Republicans feel very differently. In the same poll, 69 percent of likely Republican voters said Trump had not committed serious federal crimes and 84 percent said the charges were motivated primarily by politics.
“I think it’s all made up; they’re just doing it to spite him,” Terry Remillard, 62, said at Trump’s rally Friday in Sioux Center, Iowa. “There’s no truth to any of those charges.”
One of the biggest questions for 2024 is whether moderate and independent voters in the general election buy the version of democracy Trump is trying to sell them.
In 2022, the former president faced resounding rejection from voters when he helped his false election claims become a major issue in the midterm elections. Defeats by handpicked candidates prevented Republicans from winning the Senate majority, Trump-backed candidates lost key gubernatorial races in battleground states, and candidates he endorsed in competitive House races were defeated.
In the Times/Siena poll, a majority of likely independent voters said Trump’s felony charges were not politically motivated, that the former president had committed serious federal crimes and that he had knowingly made false claims that the elections were stolen.
Still, Biden’s lead over Trump among all likely voters (two percentage points) was within the poll’s margin of error.
Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, and Kellen Browning of the Sioux Center, Iowa.
