In a recent interview with NBC’s Seth Meyers, President Joe Biden condemned former President Donald Trump for his insistent suggestions of eventual presidential pardons for participants in the Capitol riot in the event he regains the White House.
Trump also refers to charged participants in the attack in consistently glowing terms, calling those detained “hostages,” concurrently alleging political schemes are behind the courtroom hurdles these individuals have faced.
“The first thing dictators do is they disregard whatever the rule of law is,” Biden said. “They just disregard it. Here’s a guy who says he wants to — he thinks he can change the Constitution and ignore it, just ignore parts of the Constitution. Here’s a guy who talks about retribution. Look, you have the thousands of people who stormed the Capitol, stormed the Capitol […] And what did he say? They got convicted and/or they pled guilty, and he said they’re patriots? And he says he’s going to forgive them all, and every one of them is going to be released. […] That’s not what happens in America.”
Trump still promotes the underlying allegations of a stolen election that originally drove the Capitol attack, and more broadly, his other rhetoric also still strikes a similar chord. Before what became the Capitol violence, Trump was insistent on the supposedly existential nature of imagined threats from the (imaginary) election fraud. Now, Trump is asserting the U.S. is on a path to destruction without him and comparing those challenging him in courtrooms to “Communists.” Trump just recently used the death in Russian detention of opposition leader Alexei Navalny to complain about his own supposed hurdles in the U.S., as though the circumstances are meaningfully comparable.
Besides cloaking himself in distracting language, Trump sometimes actively backs the interests of foreign dictators. He has stuck by his threats to support Russia in a potential military stand-off with NATO if members fall short of spending obligations that Trump mischaracterizes.
