South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said President Joe Biden is the "greatest threat to democracy" the country faced.
While discussing the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021 during a Sunday appearance on ABC News, Scott said he believed those who participated in rioting and assaulted Capitol police officers should be punished for their actions.
“The question is for those nonviolent folks who sat outside, who actually simply protested or came into the Capitol because the doors were open, and created no crime, no challenges, those folks today sitting crime in pretrial. That’s a devastation,” Scott said. “Some of those have been in pretrial, incarcerated for longer than the sentence attached to that crime.”
The South Carolina senator then took aim at Biden.
“The greatest threat to democracy today is Joe Biden,” he said, citing Biden's first year in office. Pressed by @JonKarl on whether he agrees with former Pres. Trump’s claims that Jan. 6 defendants are “warriors," GOP Sen. Tim Scott says, “Anyone who attacks an officer—whether on the Capitol grounds or any place else in the country—should serve time.” https://t.co/tAYu3tyq1l pic.twitter.com/y9mtzzkBT5
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) June 16, 2024
“It started back when he became president. We saw a botched Afghanistan withdrawal where 13 Americans lost their lives," Scott continued. "We’ve seen a wide-open, insecure, unsafe Southern Border with sleeper cells likely in our country, over 100,000 Chinese nationals crossing our Southern Border, men from Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan now populating our country — part of the 10 million illegal immigrant invasion.”
During an April interview, Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. similarly said Biden was a greater threat to democracy in comparison to former President Donald Trump.
“I can make the argument that President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy. And the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent," Kennedy said during an appearance on CNN, citing his recent win in the federal appeals court against Biden, which is heading to the Supreme Court. "He started censoring not just me, but 37 hours after he took the oath of office, he was censoring me."
Several weeks after Kennedy's remarks, former United States Attorney General Bill Barr also indicated Biden and the "far-left" were a greater threat to the country than Trump.
Barr warned of the nation's looming border crisis, along with rising crime and business regulation disincentivizing innovation.
"These are things that have to be done, and I think we'll get them done under a Trump administration," Barr said. "At the same time, I think the Biden administration is in fact a greater threat to democracy. They have a totalitarian temper, they have bought into the progressive movement, and they're trying to squelch opposition and freedom of speech."
Barr said he found Trump's policies to be favorable, though took issue with his behavior following the 2020 election.
"I think the idea that he’s going to be an autocrat and take over power like some right-wing dictator is not the threat facing our country," he continued. "The threat to our country is from the far-left and the drift that’s been occurring toward really a socialistic system and one that brooks no opposition, that cancels people, that has only one viewpoint taught in colleges that tries to push parents out of the picture when it comes to the education of their children."
“It is a heavy-handed bunch of thugs, in my opinion, and that’s where the threat is," Barr added.
