Washington: Targeting former President Donald Trump and other Republicans who continue to spread lies about the 2020 election, US President Joe Biden on Wednesday said that democracy cannot be taken for granted in the country, emphasizing that people have to defend democracy. With less than one week to go before the midterm elections, the President made the case in the Democratic National Committee speech that ‘American democracy is under attack because the defeated former president of the United States refused to accept the results of the 2020 election’.
While addressing the nation on preserving and protecting democracy, Biden said, ‘We can’t take democracy for granted any longer. He (Trump) refuses to accept the will of the people, he refuses to accept the fact that he lost. He has abused his power and put the loyalty to himself before loyalty to the Constitution. And he’s made a big lie an article of faith of the mega Republican Party, the minority of that party’. ‘This intimidation, this violence against Democrats, Republicans, and non-partisan officials just doing their jobs, is the consequence of lies told for power and profit, lies of conspiracy and malice, lies repeated over and over to generate a cycle of anger, hate, vitriol, and even violence’, Biden said speaking at a Democratic National Committee event at Union Station near the Capitol. Highlighting the threats to democracy and the political violence, Biden further urged people to confront those lies with the truth, ‘the very future of our nation depends on it’.
Recalling the violent assault on US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, Biden said, ‘After the assailant entered the home asking where is Nancy, where is Nancy those were the very same word used by the mob when they stormed the US capitol on January 6. When they broke the window kicked in the doors brutally attacked law enforcement roam the carters…and erected gallows to hang former vice-president Mike Pence. It was an enraged mob that have been whipped up into a frenzy by a President repeating over and over again that the big lie that the election of 20202 had been stolen, it’s a lie that fueled the dangerous rise in political violence and voter intimidation over the past two years’. On 6 January 2021, a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol complex in Washington DC as Congress was meeting to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
He further said that even before January 6, the election officials and election workers in a number of states were subject to menacing calls, physical threats even threats to their very lives. ‘In Georgia for example the Republicans Secretary of State and his family were subjected to death threats because he refused to break the law and give in to the defeated president’s demand just find him 11,780 votes’, he added. President Biden concluded his remarks, which emphasized the ‘damaging, corrosive, and destructive’ nature of election denialism and political violence, at 7.22 pm.
In his remarks, the president warned that ‘Republicans’ have contributed to a climate where some Americans have developed an ‘appetite for autocracy’. ‘We don’t settle our differences with a riot, or a mob, or a bullet, or a hammer’, President Biden said, referring to the attack on Paul Pelosi. ‘We settle them peaceably at the ballot box’. President Biden said that those who are willing to use violence to achieve political ends are a ‘distinct minority’ in America, ‘but they are loud and they are determined’. Candidates who are poised to refuse to accept the results of next week’s election, President Biden said, are choosing ‘a path to chaos in America’. ‘It’s unprecedented, it’s unlawful, and it’s un-American’. Biden closed with his familiar Jon Meacham-crafted line: ‘The fate if the soul of America lies where it always does — with the people’.
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