Given the Democratic seeming habit of milking for negativity every word uttered by Republicans from Donald Trump on down, as we discussed here last week, we were somewhat surprised by House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ declaration of war against the Trump “agenda.”
Jeffries held a press conference last Friday to lambaste the President’s directive freezing federal loans and grants, which was later rescinded. He also spoke against Republican plans to extend the president’s 201 tax cuts which he said would give tax breaks to billionaires and send the bill to the middle class.
Jeffries said “That’s not acceptable. We are going to fight it legislatively. We’re going to fight it in the courts. We’re going to fight it in the streets.”
So, we got to wondering whether he was threatening that if Democrats were unsuccessful in the legislatures and the courts, they would resort to violence in the streets to get their way? His words could certainly be read that way and predictably many Republicans did spin his remarks that way and asked for an apology.
But our interest lay in what Mr. Jeffries could have been thinking when he used the word “fight.” A little over two weeks ago, Special Counsel Jack Smith issued his final report on the Trump Jan. 6 prosecution and stated that Trump would have been convicted if the case went to trial. And one of the reasons Smith gave was that Trump’s words “inspired his supporters to commit acts of physical violence” by telling them to “fight like hell.” And Smith went on to underscore that Trump actually used the word “fight” ten times.
Interestingly, Democrats uniformly pooh-poohed any notion that Jeffries was advocating violence while, as noted, Republicans asserted just the opposite.
Perhaps it is time to go back to the old practice of granting the benefit of the doubt and thereby promote some semblance of civility in our discourse.
