White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre served up a stunning and rare rebuke Wednesday afternoon of several “extreme” MAGA Republican elected officials who are using violent rhetoric and false claims that align with former president Donald Trump’s agenda and actions.
“Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) has posted videos depicting him attacking the President and members of Congress,” Jean-Pierre responded to a reporter who asked if President Joe Biden criticizing “MAGA Republicans” and using the term “semi-fascism” to describe their ideology goes against his 2020 campaign promise to be a “uniter.”
“You have Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA),” she continued, who has “publicly expressed support for shooting prominent Democratic elected officials and suggesting physically assaulting transgender school officials,” added Jean-Pierre, who was clearly prepared.
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“You have Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), [who] has said falsely if our election system ‘continues to be rigged and continues to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place, and that’s bloodshed.’ And just last week, you had Governor Ron DeSantis suggesting that Dr. Fauci should be physically assaulted. And former President Trump has done the same many, many times.”
The reporter, CBS News chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes had asked: “Over the past week or so, we’ve heard many Republicans argue that this President ran a uniter. And now he’s calling MAGA Republicans, which is a very large swath of the American populace, ‘semi-fascists.’ He is arguing that they’re a threat to democracy. Does the White House believe that this is a fair criticism by Republicans that this is not unifying language?”
President Biden did not call MAGA Republicans “semi-fascists,” but he did refer to the MAGA ideology as “semi-fascism.”
Calling their violent rhetoric a “dangerous trend that we’re seeing,” Jean-Pierre pointed to a “New York Times headline from this month: ‘As right wing rhetoric escalates, so do threats and violence.’ And so these are things that we have to call out.”
” I was talking about the ‘soul of the nation,’ something the President has talked about since 2017. When he wrote that article in The Atlantic, and he’s called it out then, he called it out January 6, he called it out Inauguration Day. He called it out last week. He called it out yesterday. So there is been a consistent call out from the President, what he’s seeing from an extreme part of this party of the Republican Party. And historians, I would argue, would say the same.”
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