This story was originally published by Real Clear Wire
By Philip Wegmann
Real Clear Wire
Two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump have not clarified the Democrats’ position on whether the Republicans are an existential threat to democracy. The White House still calls him a threat. Vice President Kamala Harris, however, largely dismissed the remarks.
Trump wants to stop it at any cost. At least, when it was directed at him.
“It’s time to stop the lies, stop the hoax, stop the smears, stop the lawfare or false lawsuits against me, and stop claiming the enemy will turn America into a dictator. Give me a break,” said the Republican candidate at a rally Wednesday in New York.
“As a matter of fact, I’m not a threat to democracy,” he continued, before turning around and using rhetoric that only condemned his enemies. “Equal.”
Problem for Trump: Harris has moved on from that rhetoric after the first assassination attempt. He didn’t use democratic boilerplate during a rally in Milwaukee in July, and when he accepted the nomination in Chicago last month, he talked about “freedom.”
It’s a sudden shift, as Harris has typically denounced Trump as a “threat to our democracy.” He used the exact words several times while Biden was still on the ticket, most recently on July 13, which happened to be the day of the first assassination attempt.
It took Governor Tim Walz longer. While he won national headlines for branding Republicans “weird,” the Minnesota Democrat also called Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, “fascists.”
“Are they a threat to democracy? Yes. Are they going to take away our rights? Yes. Are they endangering people’s lives? Yes. Are they endangering the planet by not addressing climate change? Yes, Walz said at a press conference two weeks after his first attack on Trump.
All the same, the change is over. And since joining the ticket, Walz has followed Harris’ lead. During the ABC News debate, for example, he referred to the January 6 riots, and he took Trump’s “bloodshed” comment out of context. However, the vice president did not repeat the claim that Biden was first popularized by saying that democracy itself will stop in Trump’s second term.
The problem for Harris: Democrats working hard to put him in the Oval Office still argue that Trump can end democracy on his own.
Biden explained at the Democratic National Convention that he left the ticket because “the threat is still alive.” He likes the job, the president said as he took the stage, before adding, “I love my country more, and we have to protect our democracy.” Sitting in the crowd, Harris beamed. The note comes more than a month after the first attempt on Trump’s life.
The second assassination attempt, this one in Florida last week and foiled by the Secret Service before the shooter could open fire, did not change the White House’s rhetoric.
When pressed on whether it was appropriate to still portray Trump as a threat, an exasperated Karine Jean-Pierre said the administration “didn’t just say yes.” But, Biden’s spokeswoman replied, he was “using an example,” the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that he referenced more than a dozen times on Tuesday.
Insinuating that Biden had stoked the fire with his rhetoric, a claim Trump and nearly all elected Republicans made, he said was “dangerous.” The press secretary repeatedly pointed out that “the president and vice president have always condemned violence in all forms, including political violence.”
And the punishment of violence is universal. Move from the old framework “threat to democracy”, however, not yet. When Harris turned the page to call Trump a threat, Democratic allies followed Biden’s lead, not him. During an interview Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton returned easily and quickly to existential rhetoric.
“At the end of the day, this is a contest between freedom and oppression, between democracy and autocracy, between bringing people together and further dividing us,” said Clinton, who echoed similar themes at the Democratic convention.
That exact message — one Harris couldn’t deliver — Clinton continued, “must be communicated every day between now and the election.”
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and is available via RealClearWire.