Capitalizing on the political fallout from the Mar-a-Lago raid, President Biden will cast the GOP as “soft-on-crime” ahead of the midterms, kicking off the push in a Tuesday speech by explicitly accusing MAGA Republicans of wanting to “defund” the FBI, defend the January 6 mob, and undermine the rule of law.
“The president will make clear that Congressional Republicans’ extreme MAGA agenda is a threat to the rule of law. He will say that you can’t propose defunding the FBI or defend the mob that stormed the Capitol and attacked and assaulted police officers on January 6th and be pro-police,” said a White House official who was outlining Biden’s Tuesday speech at Wilkes University in Penn. for Politico.
President Biden has ramped up his demonization of the modern GOP recently, claiming its friendly to fascism and calling the “MAGA crowd” the “most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history” in May.
“What we’re seeing now is the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism,” Biden said at a fundraiser last week.
Biden plans to use the GOP’s rhetoric on crime, which it says is fueled by progressive policies, to its advantage by pointing to the party’s resistance to gun restrictions and its alleged ambivalence on “gun safety.” In an ABC poll this month that asked respondents which party they trusted more specifically on the issue of “gun violence,” Democrats were favored over Republicans by five points.
“The president will talk about how he brought together Democrats and Republicans earlier this summer to pass the most significant gun safety law in 30 years. He’ll say we must build on that momentum and act to ban assault weapons. A majority of Americans support it. The NRA opposes it. Do Republican Members of Congress side with the American people or the NRA? It’s time to hold every elected official’s feet to the fire,” the official said.
With homicides, robberies, and aggravated assaults spiking in many Democratic-controlled cities nationwide, Republicans have blamed the “defund the police” movement and progressive prosecutors for failing to control their streets by declining to prosecute serious offenses and immediately releasing offenders without bail.
Murder increased by at least 5 percent in 27 cities across the country from 2020 to 2021 and 44 percent from 2019 to 2021, according to a study from the Council on Criminal Justice released in January 2022.
Despite pressure from the progressive wing of his party, Biden has avoided the more extreme criminal-justice rhetoric favored by “defund the police” Democrats, trying instead to cast Republicans as extreme for resisting infringements on the Second Amendment and calling attention to corruption within federal law enforcement. Last year, the White House claimed that the GOP wanted to cut police funding because it opposed the president’s obscenely large stimulus proposal that included increased appropriations for law enforcement.
At the time, even the Washington Post debunked the talking point, discovering “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”
“What’s more, voting against a one-time infusion of cash is not the same as voting to cut funding, so there is little basis to claim that Republicans are trying to ‘defund the police’,” the fact check read.
The official told Politico that Biden will talk Tuesday about his Safer America Plan and double down on the assertion that Democrats stand for supporting the police rather than starving it of resources. Still, Biden can’t hide from what key Democrats have said on the issue previously.
After former president Obama in December 2020 warned Democrats against using “snappy” slogans like “defund the police,” Representative Ilhan Omar shot back, “It’s not a slogan but a policy demand.” Congresswoman Cori Bush, a “squad” member, ran her campaign on the phrase, declaring, “We need to defund the police and make sure that money goes back into the communities that need it.”
In June 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized New York City’s proposed $1 billion cut from the police department budget for not doing enough to actually reduce a physical police presence.
“Defunding police means defunding police,” she said. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math. It does not mean moving school police officers from the NYPD budget to the Department of Education’s budget so the exact same police remain in schools.”
In addition to these politicians, Kamala Harris, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Vanita Gupta, and Marty Walsh have all backed defund-police efforts to some extent.