Biden Rebukes Trump for Saying Constitution Should be ‘Terminated’ – Donald Trump’s comments that the US Constitution should be “terminated” over his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged drew a rebuke from the Biden White House. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, said: “Attacking the constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and should be universally condemned.” Bates called the constitution a “sacrosanct document,” saying: “You cannot only love America when you win.”
Trump called the outcome of the election a landslide in 2016, when he defeated Hillary Clinton, but lost to Joe Biden in 2020 by more than 7 million votes and by 306-232 in the electoral college. The false narrative propagated by Trump that Biden won important states through electoral fraud served as the underlying reason for the deadly attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
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The riot has been linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of law enforcement officers. Over 950 individuals have been accused. Two members of the extremist Oath Keepers militia were found guilty of seditious conspiracy this week. Similar accusations are made against other members of far-right Trump supporter groups.
Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the Capitol attack. He has not yet returned to the latter, despite its new owner, Elon Musk, saying he is free to do so. On Saturday, Trump used his own social media platform, Truth Social, to say of the 2020 election: “A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the constitution.” He also said an “unprecedented fraud requires an unprecedented cure.”
Trump was writing after Musk claimed he would show that Twitter was guilty of “free speech suppression” by releasing evidence of how the platform responded to requests from campaigns in the 2020 election. Trump is the only declared candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024, but since the midterm elections, in which many of his backed candidates lost, including election skeptics in key states, he has come under increased fire from Republicans and Republican-supporting media.
Republicans failed to retake the Senate but did win the House with a slim majority. On Saturday, Trump also criticised the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and “all of the weak Republicans who couldn’t get the presidential election of 2020 approved and out of the way fast enough.” Even after the Capitol riot, 147 Republicans objected to results in key states.
Senior Republicans have also criticized Trump for inviting a known white nationalist and antisemite, Nick Fuentes, to dinner at his Florida home. Although Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, has risen in the polls as a potential 2024 contender, few in the party have decisively broken with Trump, and those who have already largely been driven from office.
On Saturday, Brian Schatz, a Democratic US senator from Hawaii, pointed to such hard political reality, saying: “Trump just called for the suspension of the constitution and it is the final straw for zero Republicans, especially the ones who call themselves ‘constitutional conservatives’.”
One such conservative is Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader battling to become House speaker. Not long before Trump said the constitution should be terminated, McCarthy said that when his party took control in January, it would demonstrate its constitutionalist bona fides by reading “every single word” of the hallowed document on the floor of the House.
On Sunday, Hakeem Jeffries, the newly elected Democratic leader in the House, told ABC’s This Week Trump had made “a strange statement, but the Republicans are going to have to work out their issues with the former president and decide whether they’re going to break from him and return to some semblance of reasonableness or continue to lean in to the extremism, not just of Trump, but of Trumpism.”
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On Saturday, Mehdi Hasan, who hosts a show on MSNBC, said all congressional Republicans should face such grilling, writing: “Do you support Donald Trump’s demand to ‘terminate’ the constitution? Doesn’t his demand disqualify him from running for the presidency? Two questions that every single Republican member of the House and Senate needs to be asked, again and again, in the coming days.”
Hasan also pointed to Trump’s dinner at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, with Nick Fuentes, saying that in just two weeks the former president had “said or done things that would be lifelong scandals for other politicians he truly knows how to flood the zone.” Trump critics on the political right did condemn the remark. John Bolton, George W Bush’s UN ambassador who became Trump’s third national security adviser, said: “No American conservative can agree with Donald Trump’s call to suspend the constitution because of the results of the 2020 election. And all real conservatives must oppose his 2024 campaign for president.”
