The early morning crew at Fox News lashed out at President Joe Biden Friday morning, just hours after he held a fiery rally in Maryland Thursday night and made the stakes for the November midterms clear: It’s democracy or fascism.
“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,” President Biden, aware he was entering dangerous territory, declared as he steam rolled ahead.
“America must choose. You must choose — whether our country will move forward or backward,” Biden told the audience at the fundraising event that looked more like a Trump rally, packed to the gills with thousands of screaming fans of the president. “Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans have made their choice — to go backwards full of anger, violence, hate and division.”
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“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security,” Biden said. “They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”
“I want to be crystal-clear about what’s on the ballot this year,” Biden said. “Your right to choose is on the ballot this year. The Social Security you paid for from the time you had a job is on the ballot. The safety of our kids from gun violence is on the ballot.”
“MAGA Republicans don’t have a clue about the power of women. Let me tell you something: They are about to find out.”
“I respect conservative Republicans,” Biden added. “I don’t respect these MAGA Republicans.”
It was President Biden labeling Trump’s “Make America Great Again” philosophy “semi-fascism” and how he defined “MAGA Republicans” that infuriated the Fox News “Fox & Friends First” hosts.
“President Biden just trashed 70 million Trump supporters again!” one Fox News host screamed. “Boy that seems very familiar, a little like Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ comment, doesn’t it?”
In fact, it seems nothing like former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 remarks, which were almost never fully reported, although Buzzfeed’s Ruby Cramer captured them and NPR published the transcript in full, which is below.
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It’s important to note how Clinton expressed great compassion for GOP voters, and called on all Americans “to understand and empathize” with them:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America,” Clinton said barely months before the 2016 election.
“But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
Watch Fox News’ Friday morning response to President Biden’s remarks below or at this link: