Trump Ludicrously Claims Biden Is the Real Insurrectionist

MO Attorney General Jay Ashcroft might remove Biden from the ballot for … insurrection? Photo: David A. Lieb/AP

In response to Colorado and Maine removing Donald Trump from the primary-election ballot, on Friday, Missouri attorney general Jay Ashcroft threatened to remove Joe Biden from the ballot in his state:

This looked like a pretty simple matter of partisan retaliation. But there was one little problem: Trump was booted from the ballot over his involvement in the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, as the 14th Amendment bars people who “engaged in insurrection” from running for various federal offices. How is this applicable to Joe Biden?

Here’s Ashcroft’s response, per NBC News:

Asked how he would disqualify Biden from the ballot for insurrection, Ashcroft said that he’s “let an invasion unstopped into our country from the border.” Vice President Kamala Harris, he added, “supported people that were rebelling against the U.S. government during the riots in 2020,” referring to racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

The Biden-as-insurrectionist charge didn’t originate with Ashcroft, as NBC notes:

Texas’ Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also suggested last month that his state would consider removing Biden as well, “for allowing 8 million people to cross the border since he’s been president, disrupting our state far more than anything anyone else has done in recent history.”

And the idea got the ultimate sanction from Trump himself as he campaigned in Iowa on the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. The former president told Fox News Digital: “The only insurrection is the insurrection that is taking place at our border where he is allowing millions of people from parts unknown to invade our country at a level far worse than even a military invasion.”

From a constitutional point of view, of course, this is nonsense. Whether or not you view Trump’s conduct on January 6 as strictly speaking insurrectionary, it was certainly insurrection adjacent, insofar as he made an inflammatory “stop the steal” speech to a big crowd just before many of his listeners proceeded to invade the Capitol to prevent the confirmation of the president-elect’s authority to assume office. Biden has pursued immigration and asylum policies his opponents don’t like. Whatever he’s doing, it’s far from “insurrection,” if the word has any meaning.

What’s happening here is a very common MAGA tactic: accusing Democrats of whatever misconduct Trump has perpetrated. I catalogued several examples of this phenomenon back in 2019:

Accusation: Trump campaign colludes with Russia to affect the 2016 election.

Counteraccusation: Obama administration and its Secretary of State Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russian government to undermine U.S. interests.

Accusation: Trump as president obstructed justice by interfering with an FBI investigation of alleged collusion with Russia by his campaign.

Counteraccusation: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and “deep state” Democratic operatives obstructed efforts to investigate internal complicity in efforts to prevent Trump’s election, and to fabricate a Russian collusion case.

Accusation: Russia interfered in the 2016 election in order to help Trump win.

Counteraccusation: Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election in order to help Hillary Clinton win.

Accusation: Trump threatened to cut off aid to Ukraine if it didn’t investigate alleged corrupt conduct by the Bidens.

Counteraccusation: Biden as vice-president threatened to cut off aid to Ukraine if it did not fire a prosecutor he disliked.

Thus it was not surprising at all that Trump justified his participation in the January 6 effort to stop the confirmation of the president-elect’s ascension to power as an act to address a monstrous and unconstitutional injustice, or that he has transformed the Justice Department’s prosecution of him for subverting the 2020 election into a supreme act of 2024 “election interference.”

The recent claim that Biden is engaged in insurrection is part of a broader MAGA misinformation campaign designed to label the democratically elected 46th president as a “threat to democracy,” as Trump audaciously suggested in a December speech in Iowa, per the Washington Post:

“Biden and his radical left allies like to pose as defenders of democracy,” Trump told a raucous crowd of a couple thousand supporters here. “But Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy. Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy. … This campaign is a righteous crusade to liberate our republic from Biden and the criminals and the Biden administration.”

If Trump wins in 2024 and begins to implement his plan of unconstitutional vengeance against his political enemies and non-MAGA news media, you can be sure it will be couched as a defense of democracy and punishment of insurrection. Perhaps Republicans like Ashcroft would consummate the maneuver by vowing never to permit advocates of liberal policies on the border or elsewhere to appear on ballots as candidates for public office because, after all, they favor “insurrection” against the self-evidently correct policy prescriptions their own party favors. This ability to turn every criticism into a criticism of the critics is a very handy way to keep the party base fired up with righteous energy while confirming the suspicions of many swing voters that both parties are equally guilty of authoritarian tendencies and corruption. The only real victim is any sense of objective truth.