Biden prodding press to tell the truth about Trump’s threat to democracy. He shouldn’t have to
Unless you’ve been living in a hole, you’ve probably noticed that President Joe Biden and his surrogates have been more vocal of late in responding to Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged and fascist rhetoric.
From Semafor, we unsurprisingly learn that this move is intentional.
The [Biden] campaign has also been publicly pushing the press to more extensively discuss reports detailing [Trump’s] potential plans to use the federal government against enemies, implement sweeping immigration crackdowns, and more. A series of press releases warn about “Trump’s America in 2025,” accusing the former president of being “hell-bent on undermining our democratic institutions” while warning that “a national abortion ban is on the ballot in 2024” (which Trump has so far not endorsed).
A Biden campaign official told Semafor that their team planned to highlight under-the-radar policy planks proposed by Trump and his team “every day between now and Thanksgiving.”
“What we see is a failure to properly cover Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda,” the campaign official said. “I think we are filling that void.”
The unnamed campaign official might as well have called out The New York Times by name. The Times has consistently downplayed the horrific extremism of Trump’s speeches and his campaign’s plans. Calling his opponents “vermin” that he would “root out” of the nation—a line that echoes Nazi propaganda justifying the Holocaust—was shrugged off as Trump taking a speech in “a very different direction.” Even as Trump takes credit for being “the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade,” the Times pretends that the “vagueness” of his language on other occasions muddies his record on abortion—a “vagueness” that Semafor seems to accept since being a sucker is at this point a requirement of political journalism.
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