US President Joe Biden has retracted his remarks that Republican supporters of former President Donald Trump “MAGA” are a “threat” to democracy in the US, saying he does not consider any of the former president’s supporters a threat, Presstv writes.
Biden said in a fiery speech on Thursday that Trump and his quasi-MAGA movement represent “extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” And on Twitter (a social network blocked in Russia) on Friday, he said that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country”.
However, on Friday, in an interview with a Fox News reporter, he said he did not see “any Trump supporters as a threat to the country”.
“You keep trying to justify this. I don’t see any Trump supporters as a threat to the country,” Biden said, clearly contradicting his earlier remarks. “I do think that anyone who calls for violence refuses to acknowledge the election…changing the way votes are counted is a threat to democracy.”
In his speech on Thursday, Biden was careful to distinguish between the “extremist ideology” of Trump and his followers and “mainstream Republicans”. But he used strong language to describe the Trump camp, and said he “dominated” and “intimidated” the Republican Party.
“As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under attack. We’re not doing ourselves any favours by pretending we’re not. There is no doubt that the Republican Party today is being dominated, managed and intimidated by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country,” Biden said Thursday.
“History tells us that blind allegiance to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is devastating to democracy,” he said.
In his Friday response to a Fox News reporter, he struggled to clarify his position.
“Everything we stand for rests on a platform of democracy,” he told the reporter. “The people who voted for Donald Trump, support him now, they didn’t vote to attack the Capitol, they didn’t vote to disrupt the election – they voted for the philosophy he put forward.”
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