At his first rally since his home was searched by the FBI in early August, former US President Donald Trump accused his successor Joe Biden of being an “enemy of the state” during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. ).
Responding to Biden’s attacks two days earlier, Trump called last month’s sting operation a judicial parody, warning that it could cause a backlash “that no one has ever seen.”
A federal police search of the Republican’s Mar-a-Lago home found dozens of confidential government-owned documents.
“There cannot be a clearer example of the true threats to freedom than what happened a few weeks ago when we witnessed one of the most shocking abuses of power by a government in the history of the United States,” Trump said.
His insinuation that the Biden administration was involved in the operation questions adherence to the old protocols that the Justice Department and the FBI act independently of the White House. “The danger to democracy comes from the radical left. Not the right,” Trump told supporters in a combative tone.
At the rally, Trump also called the FBI and Justice Department “vicious monsters”.
He described the United States as a nation in decline, a theme that became a staple of his post-White House public speeches, and claimed once again, falsely, that he won the 2020 election.
On Thursday, Biden had called Trump and the “extremists” who follow him enemies of democracy, during a speech in Philadelphia with which he sought to encourage his supporters ahead of the midterm elections in November, when he leaves. of Congress will be re-elected.
Biden particularly attacked Republicans who espouse the MAGA (Make America Great Again) ideology, Trump’s slogan in his successful 2016 presidential campaign. He accused them of being determined “to take the country into the past.”
“To a past where there was no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry the one you love,” the Democrat said in the speech, said to be the toughest of his term so far. It was the first time in the country’s recent history that a country official had claimed that his predecessor was a threat.
The location chosen for Biden’s speech, outside Independence Hall, was as symbolic as possible. Philadelphia is considered the birthplace of American democracy, and in this building the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 and the Constitution in 1787.
In a reference to last year’s invasion of the Capitol by Trump supporters, Biden stated that “there is no place for political violence in the United States. Period. None. Never.”
