Former President Donald Trump once again proved how entrenched his divisive rhetoric has become in the White House and the entire country, as he personally forced sleepy grandpa and unifier-in-chief Joe Biden to spew some spiteful words at nearly half the country last week.
“We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated — for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm,” Biden said, as the Omicron variant — which, even though it’s so far shown to cause mild symptoms, is actually the greatest cause for panic yet — comes home for Christmas.
Even White House COVID response coordinator Jeff Zients repeated the talking point, showing what a shadow of divisiveness Trump has left in the halls of the nation’s executive branch.
It’s maddening that the former president — whose divisive acts include supporting a baby’s right to life, believing boys and girls are different, and fulfilling the constitutional duty of appointing justices to the Supreme Court — would make Biden turn on 40 percent of Americans like this. We all know Biden wouldn’t be pushing a medically-segregated, two-tiered society if Trump hadn’t forced him to; it’s not like Biden has ever supported segregation.
As spiteful as prophesying a “winter of severe illness and death” for 4 in 10 Americans might make Biden look, rest assured that it’s all in pursuit of unifying the country. After all, Biden promised “to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify.” All he wants to do is eat ice cream, tell Corn Pop stories, and stick pins in his Joe Manchin doll. And that’s exactly what he would be doing, if all those crazy Trump voters would just submit to the regime and if that darn Hunter would stop making headlines in the New York Post.
But until all those backward conservatives get on board with killing babies, putting rapists in women’s prisons, teaching children that their race defines them, and updating the Merriam-Webster definition of “parent” to be “domestic terrorist,” Biden will have no choice but to shame them for their radical beliefs. If they try to exercise their First Amendment right to peaceful protest, Biden’s cronies may even have to issue subpoenas for their phone records and/or put them in prison.
Meanwhile, as Americans’ demands for medical freedom, free expression, and other outdated ideas grow more outrageous, we should all go thank CNN and the rest of the corporate media for warning us about Trump’s divisiveness and beg their forgiveness for not setting more of Fox News’s Christmas trees on fire in response. We all should have known, when Trump did “dark and divisive” things like celebrating Independence Day with a fireworks display at Mount Rushmore, what was coming.
But instead, we let the conservatives’ hateful rhetoric get to us. We even let them convince us that shutting down people’s livelihoods for months on end and causing soaring inflation are bad things, so Biden is now having to work overtime to undo the damage from that misinformation. (Thankfully, The Washington Post has come to the rescue reminding all of us that we need to lower our expectations.)
Yes, it’s unfortunate that Biden has to condemn nearly half the country to a “winter of death,” but it had to be done to save democracy from dying in an even worse winter of darkness and death (just as we had to relax voting laws and censor dissent on Big Tech platforms). I’m sure those people will understand by the next election — if they can get into the polls without a vaxx card.
