“The guy is not a democrat with a small d,” the president told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
President Joe Biden said in an interview Wednesday he is all but certain Donald Trump, his predecessor and presumptive 2024 rival, will reject the results of the November election and called Trump “dangerous” for the nation.
“The guy is not a democrat with a small d,” Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett during a visit to Wisconsin this week.
“How many court cases do they have, Supreme Court cases? They’ve all said this is a totally legitimate election. … He may not accept the outcome of the election? I promise you he won’t. Which is dangerous.”
The president went on to say other world leaders had expressed to him their fear of a second Trump presidency and pointed to Trump’s pledge to prosecute his political opponents if he enters the Oval Office once more.
I didn’t downvote you, but my frustration with statements like this is that there is no other dragon slayers to call up now. There is no scenario where Biden is not the Democratic nominee in November. I agree we should have a better candidate, Biden is not my preference at all, but that’s reality. Asking for a new candidate for this election is a complete nonstarter.
I’m not even asking for a new candidate at this point, I’m just asking for Biden to do better. I totally think he is capable of doing more and doing better, but it seems like he just doesn’t want to. And it seems like the moderates don’t expect him to, as if they also are frustrated with him. A lot of the progressive frustration comes from the fact that we had warned about this years prior And we’re just told to shut up about it.
If we need a dragon slayer to meet the moment and Joe Biden is all we have, then we better start training him to be a dragon slayer. We really should have been doing that four years ago.
Instead, the election is coming up and we have someone who might not be able to slay the dragon… versus a dragon. We can help all we can, but it’s really up to him to slay the dragon in the end. I just don’t think we put ourselves in the best situation if the goal is to kill the dragon.
What would you have liked the Democrats to have done, keeping in mind that Republicans have a majority in the house? Can’t amend the Constitution.
Republicans keep being given the power to delay and deny anything the Democrats want done, and then people complain about Democrats not doing enough, so they don’t vote, which allows Republicans to keep doing it.
It’s frustrating how successful the strategy is working for them.
Exactly. The first priority is removing the GOP roadblocks. I’m a progressive. I desperately want progressive policy enacted. There is no viable path to make that happen without electing more Democrats in general elections. I recognize that the Democratic party is not a progressive party, but that’s our job to change via primaries.
My biggest complaint about my fellow progressives is a lot of them seem to refuse to think strategically and cling to the idea that your vote is somehow a moral choice. It’s not. It’s a strategic choice to further your interests. Helping elect Republicans during the general election does nothing but put us even further away. Biden is not our champion, he’s a tool. We use Biden to promote our interests where we can and ditch him the moment he’s no longer needed. Right now, he’s absolutely needed.
For starters, Biden should have picked a better AG, that would have gone a long way. Secondly, Democrats should have impeached Trump THE DAY OF THE INSURRECTION, while Republican support was wavering in the uncertainty. Instead they waited months.
We could have removed the filibuster to ease legislation.
Mind you, all of this was stuff progressives were screaming at the time but moderates ignored.
At the time, picking Garland as AG was a giant fuck you to republicans to get revenge on them denying Obama the supreme court nomination in 2016, a way of saying “ha, ha, you denied him a seat and now we gave him one that’s almost as good.”
Unfortunately, in hindsight it turns out that when you put a very moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican in the cabinet, they will run their department like a moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican, and that resulted in the DOJ focusing on the mooks more than the masterminds out of fear of being seen as a political hatchet man.
But I, alongside many other progressives, explicitly said Garland was going to be exactly like this.
As is sadly often the case, progressives are right in the moment, and then history has to look back on them as being correct in the moment. It wasn’t hindsight that told us this.
I mean you look at history and almost always whether it be the civil rights movement or the gay rights movement or workers rights progressives are always 100% of the time on the right side of history, but they are never given the credit.
You seem to have mistaken my post as defending or supporting Garland’s appointment. Please rest assured that is not the case.