A senior White House adviser said Sunday that President Biden “spoke optimistically” during last week’s prime-time address decrying MAGA Republicans as a threat to democracy.
“The president spoke optimistically about who we are as Americans,” adviser Keisha Lance Bottoms said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We are the greatest nation in the world. But also a reminder that we have to be intentional about being the greatest nation in the world and that we have to call out hatred. We have to call out this balance and that if we don’t, our democracy is in danger.”
Mr. Biden, who ran on unifying the country, has been accused of sowing division after saying Thursday that former President Donald Trump and his supporters “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
In a campaign rally Saturday, Mr. Trump charged his predecessor with deploying the “most vicious, hateful and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president.”
Ms. Lance Bottoms, a former mayor of Atlanta, tried to flip the script and pointed to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as evidence that it is the GOP running on a hateful agenda.
“This MAGA Republican agenda — this hate-filled agenda, the MAGA Republican agenda that we saw incite violence on our nation’s Capitol — has no place in a democracy,” she said. “And if we are not intentionally about calling it out, which is what the president did, then our country, everything that our country is built upon is in danger.”
• Ramsey Touchberry can be reached at rtouchberry@washingtontimes.com.
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