A clip showing former president Donald Trump labelling Democrats as “fascists” is making the rounds online after conservatives attacked President Joe Biden for slamming “MAGA Republicans” in a prime-time address.
On Wednesday night, Mr Biden took the podium at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to offer a rare and direct rebuke of his predecessor and his supporters who said, “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic”.
Right-wing media circles and politicians were quick to swoop in and hit back at Mr Biden’s speech, labelling it dictatorial and providing supposed proof that the Democrat was declaring war against “Red State America”.
“President Biden tonight gave the speech of dictator in the style of a dictator, in the visual of a dictator, using the words of a dictator,” said Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Mr Trump, during an appearance on Fox News after the speech.
Others took to reaming out the aesthetics of Mr Biden’s backdrop, comparing the two marines on his side and the red curtaining around him as something akin to a speech delivered by Adolf Hitler in Nazi-era Germany.
However, also in the wake of the speech, a video has since begun circulating that appears to show Mr Trump making a more blanketed attack on the party across the aisle, all while flanked by military personnel.
Matthew Sheffield, a journalist with The Young Turks, shared the clip of the one-term president on Twitter on Friday night. The clip was from a campaign event in 2020.
In the clip, the ex-president begins listing all the wrongs of the Democratic party, which included the move away from fossil fuels, reproductive rights and the claim that the party wanted to “replace American freedom with left-wing fascism.”
“Fascists. They are fascists. Some of them, not all of them. But some of them, but they’re getting closer and closer. We have to win this election,” Mr Trump adds in the since viral clip.
Mr Trump was known throughout his administration for giving progressives within the Democratic party unearned labels. In 2019, the former president came under fire for comments he lobbed at four Democratic congresswomen of colour, after he claimed that they hated America while also falsely claiming that Representative Ilhan Omar – one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress – was an Al Qaeda sympathiser.
“He’s launching a blatantly racist attack on four duly elected members of the United States House of Representatives, all of whom are women of colour,” said Rep Omar, a Democrat of Minnesota, at the time.
The clip of Mr Trump calling Democrats fascists later got picked up by MSNBC host Chris Hayes, who noted that the troubling and ironic part of the video only gaining traction now was a sad reflection of the daily onslaught of ridiculous statements that were coming out of the White House during the Trump administration.
“The funniest part of people finding and reposting this is that at the time it got basically zero coverage because it was completely par for the course for Trump,” said Mr Hayes.
