On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Katy Tur Reports,” host Katy Tur stated that “there is a lot of very explosive language coming out of the left as well. But when they’re talking about threats to democracy — when President Biden was, at least — they were pointing to January 6 and what happened on that day and this idea that Donald Trump keeps spreading this lie about the election being stolen from him in 2020. And they’re also pointing to Donald Trump’s own words, I want to be a dictator on day one.”
The Dispatch Senior Writer and Vanity Fair Contributing Writer David Drucker said, “[N]o doubt, the rhetoric from the other side has really heated up post-January 6, with, nothing else, President Biden regularly referr[ing] to the former President as a threat to democracy, and you can find all sorts of conversations among Democrats about Trump wanting to be a dictator, and, if he gets elected, he’ll never leave, and things like that. But the idea that this only flows one way is simply not born out by reality. I’d also point out that, since Kamala Harris, the Vice President, took over for Biden as the Democratic nominee, she’s really de-emphasized, at least in her general messaging, this threat to democracy that was so much a part of President Biden’s campaign, and instead, talks about Donald Trump as a threat to freedoms, freedom to access abortion, freedom to read the books you want, to join a union, things that are more run-of-the-mill and less catastrophic. I don’t know if what happened in July, where the president was actually hit by a bullet and almost killed and a rallygoer behind him was murdered by the assassin, if that had anything to do with it, but what you see coming out of the Harris campaign is slightly different than what you saw coming out of the Biden campaign. It’ll just be interesting to see what Trump does moving forward.”
Tur responded, “I hear what you’re saying, and there is a lot of very explosive language coming out of the left as well. But when they’re talking about threats to democracy — when President Biden was, at least — they were pointing to January 6 and what happened on that day and this idea that Donald Trump keeps spreading this lie about the election being stolen from him in 2020. And they’re also pointing to Donald Trump’s own words, I want to be a dictator on day one. Trump says he is joking about that, but we’ve had so many instances in the past where he’s claimed he was joking about something that was pretty serious or extreme.”
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