On Saturday, former President Donald Trump made an effort to reverse the fortunes of President Joe Biden, whom he is expected to face in November, by claiming that Biden is “the destroyer of American democracy.”
The accusations that Democratic candidate Joe Biden has been making about his predecessor for years are echoed by Trump. As Trump has dominated the Republican primary and made threats against his opponents and the media in the event that he wins the presidency once more, Biden has intensified his own caution, claiming that Trump is “determined to destroy American democracy.”
Trump presented his clearest case so far on Saturday, explaining to voters why his opponent poses a greater threat to democracy.
Rump reiterated his long-standing claim that Biden is abusing the federal justice system against his opponent, as evidenced by the four criminal indictments against him.
To an audience in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump declared, “He’s been weaponizing government against his political opponents like a Third World political tyrant.” Trump went on, saying, “Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy; Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.” Biden and his extreme left colleagues “like to pose as standing up as allies of democracy.”
A spokesperson for the Biden campaign, Ammar Moussa, retorted, saying that in Donald Trump’s America of 2025, the government would be his personal tool for imprisoning his political opponents. You don’t need to believe us because Trump has acknowledged it himself.
Should Biden win reelection to the White House, Trump has long pledged to bring retaliatory charges against him. But on Saturday, the former president expanded on his defense of Biden’s threat to democracy to include legal actions brought by two liberal groups that aim to disqualify him from office based on a little-used Civil War-era constitutional clause that forbids people who “engaged in insurrection” from holding public office.
Thus far, every lawsuit has failed. Although Democratic backers of Biden have no role in them, they also contribute to the funding of the leftist organizations making the charges. As a result, Trump accused the president of having “defaced the Constitution” by attempting to thwart his efforts.
Furthermore, the former president seems cognizant of the accusations leveled at him, despite his lengthy record of endorsing autocratic dictators and occasionally parroting their words. According to Trump, “Americans don’t like fascists.” He claimed that North Korean President Kim Jong Un liked him and lauded Chinese President Xi Jinping and the country’s criminal justice system for quickly putting drug traffickers to death.
Though he attempted to justify these ties, Trump observed that he was frequently criticized for them. “It’s beneficial to maintain cordial relations with those who possess nuclear weapons,” he declared.
There is no proof that the 2020 election was rigged, but Trump continued to claim throughout the speech that the presidential election he lost was “stolen” and that elections in the United States are “rigged” overall.
Numerous cases were dropped by the government and courts, and independent studies haven’t discovered enough evidence of purported fraud to call into doubt the decision.
Supporters of Trump would assault the US. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to halt the official certification of Trump’s defeat by Biden. Trump persisted in calling some of the people detained in relation to the violence “political prisoners” on Saturday.
They traveled from all across the country, having been called by President Trump to march on Washington to back his fictitious allegation that the election in November was rigged and to prevent Congress from accrediting Democrat Joe Biden as the winner.
Large-scale demonstration in Washington, D.C. One week prior to Christmas, Trump tweeted, “On January 6th, “attend; it’s going to be crazy!”
The rebellious crowd invaded the United States at the president’s command. Longtime Trump supporters crowded the Capitol, including GOP political donors, far-right militants, white nationalists, off-duty police, members of the armed forces, and believers in the hoax that the government is secretly run by a group of cannibalistic, Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
Some of them, according to records, were heavily armed and included convicted felons, including a man from Florida who was just out of jail after trying to kill someone.
One of Trump’s favorite campaign-trail topics, accusations of Democratic election fraud, was brought up again earlier in the day at a rally in Ankeny, Iowa. In 2024, he exhorted the assembly to “guard the vote,” citing a number of diverse communities that he has frequently disparaged as potential hubs for fraud.
“We have to watch those votes when they come in, and you should go into Detroit, Philadelphia, and some of these places, Atlanta, and you should go into some of these places,” Trump said to his followers.
According to Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been closely monitoring the electoral deceptions since 2020, “it demonstrates a profound cynicism about the political process and the gullibility of Trump’s supporters.”
As Hasen put it, “It’s really playing with fire.” He stated, “It’s one thing to make extravagant and unfounded claims about someone’s stance on taxes or immigration, but it’s quite another to make the same claims about the actual voting and ballot-counting process: “Lose assertions about elections are far more harmful than falsehoods about actual policy.”
It was evident right away that Trump’s claims of massive fraud were untrue.