The writing was on the wall almost immediately.
Even before Biden’s fascistic speech last Thursday concluded, it was obvious that the White House had made a mistake.
Related: Biden’s Hitler-Esque Speech Was Even Too Much for CNN
But even that wasn’t enough to keep some at the left-leaning network from feeling uneasy about it. The use of the Marines behind Biden for such a blatantly political speech was criticized by the network’s chief national affairs correspondent, Jeff Zeleny, who called it a “break with White House traditions.”
“Whatever you think of this speech the military is supposed to be apolitical,” CNN’s Brianna Keilar tweeted. “Positioning Marines in uniform behind President Biden for a political speech flies in the face of that. It’s wrong when Democrats do it. It’s wrong when Republicans do it.”
The very next day, Biden even made an effort to backpedal from the inflammatory language he had used the night before. Although he had repeatedly attacked Trump supporters, he still had the nerve to deny it.
“I don’t consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country,” Biden said. “I do think anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn violence when it is used, refuses to acknowledge when an election has been won, insists upon changing the way in which they can count votes, that is a threat to democracy.”
Since then, his public statements about the speech and what he “really meant” have been all over the place.
But, on Tuesday we finally got a glimpse of what Americans thought about the speech, and boy is it bad for the Biden administration. A new poll of 1,000 likely voters by The Trafalgar Group with Convention of States Action found that a majority of voters feel it represented “a dangerous escalation in rhetoric” and was “designed to incite conflict amongst Americans.”
“When voters tell you they think that the prepared remarks of a sitting President of the United States is a dangerous escalation and was designed to incite conflict, we are living in terrifying times,” said Mark Meckler, President of the Convention of States. “Perhaps even more terrifying is the fact that a huge majority of Democrats think this was just a routine, election year stump speech.”
While attitudes towards the speech depended largely on party identification, unaffiliated voters overwhelmingly agreed that Biden’s speech was a dangerous escalation of rhetoric. Elections are typically won based on who gets support from the middle, and the middle largely agrees with Republicans that Joe Biden’s speech went too far. No doubt, it’s tricky to label your opponents as “semi-fascists” when you gave a speech that sounded like it came right out of 1933 Germany. The only difference was the scapegoat: Hitler’s was the Jews, while Joe Biden’s was MAGA Republicans.
Many in the media have suggested that the recent abortion ruling from the Supreme Court gave Democrats a fighting chance to stave off a shellacking at the polls in November. But between the unprecedented raid on Trump’s home in Florida and this speech, the Biden White House seems determined to reinvigorate the MAGA Republicans he slandered in his speech.