Democrats Sure Aren’t Acting as if Trump Beating Biden Is an Existential Threat to Democracy
SlateFor all the talk from congressional Democrats about Donald Trump being an existential threat to democracy, they sure aren’t acting like it. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who later chaired the special congressional committee investigating the attempted election subversion, said, “Though it has been apparent for years, it is more clear than ever that President Trump is a direct threat to the homeland.” Democrats’ rhetoric against Trump has been apocalyptic and existential since that moment. Related From Slate There’s a Reason Trump Is Suddenly Lying About Project 2025 Despite this, few congressional Democrats have spoken up to call on Biden to step aside now, before he is officially nominated, when it would be easy to have another Democrat’s name appear on the ballot. Yet Biden seems to be taking this in stride too, telling interviewer George Stephanopoulos, when asked how he would feel next January if he stayed in the race and lost to Trump, “I’ll feel, as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” If it’s really true, though, that a second Trump term would be the kind of “five-alarm fire” that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned about in her dissent in the Supreme Court’s immunity case, and if Democrats really believe that a Biden loss is inevitable, then their failure to speak up now and intervene with Biden cannot be squared with their rhetoric of the Trump apocalypse of a second term.