Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she tells Republican leaders, “We’re out to get you, you’re dead,” and likened Donald Trump to a fascist, weeks after Trump was shot in the ear by a would-be assassin.
Pelosi pounded the table angrily in an interview with reporters while “dispensing wisdom that sounds like a mix of a crime boss and local party activist,” The Washington Post reported.
Following the assassination attempt on Trump, President Joe Biden gave an Oval Office address that said that political rhetoric has a role in contributing to violence. “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” Biden said. “The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. And we all have a responsibility to do that.”
“Unity is the most elusive of goals right now, nothing is more important for us now than standing together,” he said. “We debate and disagree. We compare and contrast the character of the candidates, the records, the issues, the agenda, the vision for America. … Politics must never be a literal battlefield and, God forbid, a killing field.”
But in an interview days later, he said that he would not change any of his own rhetoric, implying oddly that it was rhetoric from Republicans that caused the Republican nominee for president to be shot. In that interview, he also could not think of a single nice thing to say about Trump. He said Trump “wants to be a dictator on day one.”
If the premise that Trump is a fascist or dictator were true, violence would conceivably be justified.
The Post said Pelosi is focused “squarely on defeating Trump, whom she called ‘unpatriotic’ and whom she compared to fascist regimes for his attempts to destroy faith in independent media.”
“Nothing that I do has anything to do with him, except his downfall,” Pelosi said.
She said she refuses to be friends with Republicans who like Trump, and when freshmen Republicans asked her to attend invitations focused on their shared Italian heritage, she refused and said, “I do not like you. I’m out to get you, I’m out to get you.”
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Biden also used violent language about House Speaker Mike Johnson after the Trump assassination attempt. When a reporter told him that Johnson said a Democrat bill was “dead on arrival,” Biden said, “he is — dead on arrival.”
The refusal to tone down violent rhetoric on the part of Democrats comes despite political violence being primarily a Democrat problem. Democrats attempted to kill congressional Republicans at a baseball practice, and went to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house with a plan to kill him. All presidents assassinated in history were Republicans except John F. Kennedy, who was killed by an apparent communist.
Both Biden and Pelosi cited an attack on Pelosi’s husband as a parallel to the shooting of Trump, but Pelosi’s husband was attacked by a hammer by a homeless illegal immigrant hippy. Biden also drew an analogy to the “violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6th,” even though many of the protesters were gun owners, and yet the only person shot was Ashley Babbitt, a protester who was killed by a police officer.
That framing of January 6, even under intense pressure to draw bipartisan equivalencies about assassination attempts, raises further questions about a pipe bomb that the FBI claimed was found at the Democratic National Committee on January 6.
Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee for president, was at the DNC at the time, yet instead of using it as an example of the seriousness of that day, authorities hid the fact that Harris was ever there, instead falsely filing paperwork saying she was at the Capitol.
The bureau said it could not figure out who placed the bomb there, despite rounding up more than 1,000 people who were present at the Capitol using cell phone data and other techniques. An FBI whistleblower said the bureau quickly zeroed in on a former government official in Virginia, and that he was ordered to stake out the home then abruptly pulled off of it. Video shows the bomb planter waving to a police officer.
Harris and other Democrats have gone out of their way to never mention the pipe bomb since, leading Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to allege a “coverup.”