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Biden in desperate, futile damage control following angry speech demonizing half of America’s voters

September 3, 2022 | | Print Article

President Joe Biden’s much-criticized speech this week in which he demonized half of the nation’s voters continues to negatively reverberate, and current attempts to walk it back may be futile.

Among the vociferous voices calling out the president’s divisive speech slamming Republicans is a former senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Justice. In a piece published in the Daily Mail Friday, Dr. Jonathan Bronitsky, who served as chief speechwriter for U.S. Attorney General William Barr, took aim at Biden’s address which he called a “Kabul-sized catastrophe.”

Bronitsky joined the army of critics in declaring the president’s remarks “the darkest, most toxic presidential speech of the modern era,” and addressed Biden’s partial walk-back on Friday when he claimed he doesn’t actually consider any Donald Trump supporters to be “threat” to the nation, writing that the “Commander in Chief is trying to gaslight America to believe he didn’t say what it just heard him say.”

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic,” Biden had said in his speech. But on Friday, speaking with reporters, he asserted, “C’mon, look guys, I don’t consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country.”

In his op-ed, Bronitsky noted that this “wasn’t a slip of the tongue” by Biden.

“Biden was not talking about a narrow slice of the Republican Party there. He was clearly referring to – and slandering – a major portion of the country that believes in the sanctity of life and steadfastly honors the traditional morality that has made America exceptional,” he wrote.

“Biden was reading prepared marks, approved at multiple levels, that perfectly echoed the rhetoric of his administration,” he pointed out.

And while the president has previously been hostile to Republicans who oppose his agenda, as in January when he compared GOP lawmakers to segregationists for opposing the so-called voting rights bill, this week’s remarks were “taking square aim at regular citizens.”

“Again, this was not an instance of uttering the quiet part out loud. What we’re currently witnessing is a desperate – and what will ultimately prove – a futile attempt at damage control,” Bronitsky wrote.

“Biden spewed what his few supporters craved – a partisan oration designed to gin up emotion ahead of the midterms,” he noted, adding that, if the speech was a movie, it “would have been rated PG-13 for language that goes ‘beyond polite conversation.'”

“This was all a far cry from the carefully parsed distinctions that the president is attempting to claim today. And now, he – or someone else over at 1600 Pennsylvania – deeply regrets the prime-time appearance,” Bronitsky continued.

“The left foams at the mouth that Trump was divisive and claims that Biden is the antithesis of the former president,” he noted. “Can anyone who identifies as a liberal or progressive insist with a straight face that last night’s speech was anything other than a political hit job? Or that it will begin to mend any of the country’s many divides?”

Biden’s speech attacking “MAGA Republicans” for their support of an agenda that prioritizes America’s interests is “audacious and sweeping language,” Bronitsky argued, that “means Biden – or whoever wrote his speech – is convinced that his adversaries comprise a significant part of the conservative movement.”

“As an address to the nation as a whole, intended to start bridging divides and save democracy, it was a Kabul-sized catastrophe,” he concluded. “And there’s no walking back from that.”

Frieda Powers
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