After years of President Joe Biden’s warnings that the “deadly serious” Donald Trump is the single greatest danger to American democracy and “a threat to our freedom” and “literally everything America stands for,” a lone gunman took the current president’s diatribes about the former president both seriously and literally.
Twenty-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks shot four people, killing one, and coming within an inch of murdering the de facto Republican presidential nominee. By the grace of God and hair’s breadth turn of Trump’s head, Crooks blew out a bloody, but ultimately innocuous, chunk of Trump’s ear, not his entire head.
When Biden announced his bid for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the then-former vice president claimed it was the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville that had compelled him to reemerge from his premature retirement, reiterating his since-oft repeated line that “we are living through a battle for the soul of this nation.” Half a decade later and the verdict is clear: After a season of a new Charlottesville-style rally or riot against Jews cropping up on various college campuses and city centers every single weekend, the attempt to steal the 2024 election from Trump graduated from mere lawfare to violence. In the battle for the soul of the nation and the promise to restore the decency and norms he once held dear, Biden has failed.
To be abundantly clear, neither Biden nor his White House has condoned Saturday’s shooting in any way, with the president pledging on Sunday that his party must beat Trump “at the ballot box,” not with bullets. Biden and his allies did not call for violence against Trump, and they quickly came out to condemn it in the aftermath.
But there’s little doubt they dialed up the temperature against Trump, with Biden allies Joy Reid and the New Republic deeming Trump as evil as Adolf Hitler and Biden himself repeatedly calling Trump a threat” not just to Democratic political prospects but to “civil rights,” “voting rights,” “America’s standing in the world,” and the entire lowercase-D democratic political experiment.
With rhetoric like that, it logically follows that a recent Marist College poll found that a fifth of respondents agreed that “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track.” For respondents ages 18 through 29, that figure rises to a whopping 42%.
Does Biden bear responsibility for the shooting specifically? By his own logic, Biden does, as he posted during the race riots of 2020 that “every example of violence Donald Trump decries has happened on his watch” and “under his leadership.”
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A cooler rationale would allow that Biden isn’t responsible for an incident that constituted not only murder but also an attempt at stealing an election a couple thousand times more serious than the travesty that was Jan. 6. No, Biden did not pull the trigger, order the shooting, or write it off in the aftermath. He was concerted and uncommonly cogent in his repeated condemnations of the shooting and has reportedly reached out multiple times to Trump and his team.
But a new Charlottesville has cropped up every week under Biden’s leadership, as has Jan. 6 on steroids. Biden has lost the battle for the soul of this nation, and that’s why he will lose the 2024 election.
