In a discussion on MSNBC, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who is currently the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, predicted this year would ultimately see the mobilization of millions of Americans towards the ambition of keeping Donald Trump from power. Trump continues running for another four years as president and remains generally on track for the GOP nomination despite his four criminal cases and nearly 100 individual criminal charges.
Raskin was speaking after an address from President Joe Biden in which the commander-in-chief, who looks set to face Trump again this November, cast the unfolding presidential race as deciding a question of whether the U.S. would stick with democracy or fall away with potentially disastrous consequences.
“It was the kind of speech, I think, that will galvanize and mobilize millions and millions of people across the country to get in this fight. This is not an election where people can sit on the sofa and look back and watch the polls and so on. This is an election where people need to be involved in the process. Don’t be in the prognostication business. Be in the mobilization business,” Raskin said.
“Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions. Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? I mean it,” Biden said in his Friday remarks. “This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about.” In the time since the deadly Capitol violence of early 2021, Trump has repeatedly expressed direct support for participants in the attack.
Perhaps most substantively, he has shared interest in potentially pardoning such individuals if he regains the White House. To be clear, charged and convicted defendants with cases from January 6 include hundreds accused and convicted of assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, sometimes inflicting serious, physical injuries. Just recently, one rioter who used a stolen police baton against then-Officer Aquilino Gonell, seriously injuring Gonell’s hand, was sentenced to over four years in prison. Another defendant more recently got a decade after temporarily going on the lam before his originally scheduled sentencing. Are these the people who Trump is interested in pardoning?
