Thursday, August 6, 2020

Figuratively

[Joe Biden is] going to do things that nobody would ever think possible because he’s following the radical left agenda. Take away your guns, destroy your Second Amendment. No religion. No anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy, our kind of energy.
President Donald Trump. Burke Lakefront Airport. Cleveland, Ohio. 6 August, 2020.
This strikes me as a prime example of the sort of statement that people point to when they say that President Trump should be taken "seriously, but not literally." The idea that a Biden Administration could decide, on its own to repeal, or even simply ignore, the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is ludicrous on its face. And what could a Biden Administration possibly do to "hurt the Bible?"

Taken literally, the President's remarks make no sense. Taken as "Joe Biden is a radical leftist who will threaten the things that are important to you," however, and they're rational. It's the same argument that candidates for President always make. The number of dangerous radicals who have managed to land in governors' mansions, state legislatures and Congress is off the charts, according to the people who have run against these supposed enemies of all that's good and right in the world. The fact that none of the winners were able to destroy the nation has gone unnoticed by the political class thus far. Of course, a significant portion of the voting public also appears to have not gotten the memo that the Republic is unlikely to the done in quickly, and so they're still susceptible to scare tactics on the part of their chosen politicians. Because while the audience for President Trump's comments might understand that a President Biden wouldn't be able to simply outlaw religion out of the blue, they do believe that he'd be able to implement policies that would injure them to advance "the radical left agenda," even if exactly how he might do that is currently a matter of imagination.

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