How are Biden and Harris Endangering Trump’s Security?

Former President Donald Trump blames Vice President Kamala Harris for the assassination attempt on him. He told Fox News Digital that the would-be assign had “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it.”

What did the potential assassin believe that the Democrats had said?

Harris posted on X, Sept 9, she said, “Take it from the people who worked for him: Donald Trump is a danger to our troops, our security, and our democracy.”  Is Trump saying those former employees are threatening him? Or should Harris not have made those beliefs public?

Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin went public with her views. She told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “that one of the biggest offenders of escalatory rhetoric is Donald Trump and JD Vance. And by the way, it does put people at risk.”

Focusing specifically on Harris, calling her Comrade Kamala on X, Trump said she had
“taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust.” At their televised debate, he said that bullets were fired at him “because of the things that they say about me.” According to Trump, for her to say that he endangers our democracy is “Communist Left Rhetoric.”

Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, talking at a convocation of the Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition, said that we can’t say that a candidate is a fascist and that “if he is elected, it’s going to be the end of American democracy.”

Apparently, Vance did think that way about Trump. In 2016, Vance once questioned whether Trump could be “America’s Hitler” in a private Facebook message to one of his former roommates while Trump was running for president. But that wasn’t a public statement, or he might not have been picked as Trump’s Vice President candidate this year.

In his talk, Vance most likely was referring to President Joe Biden telling an audience in August 2022, “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.”

Saying that one’s philosophy “is like semi-fascism” is not as incendiary as when, 11 days before Vance’s speech,  Trump on C-Span said, “Kamala Harris is the first major party nominee in American history who fundamentally rejects freedom and embraces Marxism, communism, and fascism.”

Like any citizen, Trump has the freedom of speech to say anything he wants. He can freely accuse his opponents of being anything across the political spectrum from communist to fascist. He can label anyone he wishes as the enemy of the nation. That is how free speech works.

Accordingly, it is not unlawful for Trump to break with our democratic norms by seeing his opponents not as differing in policies that shape legislation but as existential threats to our nation. Trump said during a Fox News interview on September 16, “They are the ones that are destroying the country—both from the inside and out . . . It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat.”

On his Truth Social platform, he reposted messages to his 7 million followers calling for his political opponents to be jailed and for some, like former President Barack Obama, to face “public military tribunals.”

Given Trump’s blustering style, he may not believe what he’s saying. However, Trump’s maliciously calling other public figures enemies of our country could incite his supporters to do something, like invading Congress and calling to lynch his vice president. The problem with vilifying your opponent is that once you start the hate ball rolling down the hill, it’s hard to stop it from morphing into violence.

He kicked that ball on January 6 by igniting tens of thousands, telling them to fight Congress from accepting the electoral college results that showed Joe Biden winning by a fraudulent vote. Trump sees the insurgents as the ones protecting America’s freedom, and he has since called them “patriots.”

Two hundred and ten of those patriots, charged for their participation in the January 6th insurrection, argued to the federal judges that they considered Trump, their leader and believed they were following his lead by joining the insurrection. They purposefully tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power, which needs to occur every four years to sustain our democratic republic.

Most citizens would consider this peaceful transition of power critical to our democracy. By extension, someone who rewards those who try to overthrow the democratic process by stopping it would be considered dangerous.

This was precisely the attitude of Venezuela’s past President, Hugo Chávez, when he thanked those who had tried to overthrow their democracy before he became president. He didn’t want to leave office and manipulated government and media outlets to sustain his presidency.Trump’s belief that he is still the legitimate president sounds familiar to Nicolás Maduro, who took control of the government after Chavez died. Maduro uses his executive authority to stay in office and deny his opponents fair access to the media and the voting booths.

Trump is not pursuing those objectives through edicts or direct intervention. However, he can rely on Supreme Court rulings to extend his executive powers and give him greater influence over the previously independent federal agencies like the Department of Justice, which has objected to voter-suppression state rules.

Trump found the DOJ to be less compliant than he wished. Russell T. Vought, who headed Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, boasted that it would no longer be an obstruction in Trump’s second administration: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

Recent SCOTUS rulings promote the unitary executive theory, which legal experts describe as “an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House.”

In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4  in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, that under the Vesting Clause of Article II, “the entire ‘executive Power’ belongs to the President alone.” Consequently, Trump has repeatedly claimed that Article II of the Constitution gives him unlimited powers.

Furthermore, in alignment with this theory, the 2024 Supreme Court ruling on Trump v. United States by the six conservative justices gave the president even more power. Their decision would make it difficult to legally challenge presidents requiring independent executive agencies to be personally loyal to them.

The SCOTUS rulings tilt the balance toward the presidency over Congress, which all presidents would find attractive.  For instance, Barack Obama campaigned loudly against the theory but embraced some aspects after the 2010 midterm elections.

In a sense, Trump’s accusations that Democrats are a danger to democracy would carry some weight if they were making the same threats that he makes to his enemies in the government. Any president will now have more court decisions to back up their decisions that bend the norms of democratic decision-making.

Trump, not Biden, has a record of promoting conspiracy theories that create a fear of the “other” who are out to destroy our nation. By selecting the loyal Attorney General to head up the DOJ, Trump can investigate any number of conspiracies.

He directed his former AG, Bill Barr, to discover how the election had been stolen from him. Barr dutifully investigated and then informed Trump there was no conspiracy – indeed, he lost the election. Barr told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Donald Trump “knew well he lost the election.” To this day, Trump claims he won.

If elected president, Trump will continue to believe he has enemies he needs to expose and punish. In his next term, he will have more legal power to find and punish them. He could tag them as communists or fascists, as he has to date. If so, they would face social, employment, and legal repercussions. Who would dare say that Trump is a danger to democracy?