‘MANIPULATION’: Sen. Mike Lee Dismisses Biden’s Calls for Unity After Trump Shot
Hudson Crozier /
President Joe Biden’s “unity” rhetoric after the attempted assassination Saturday of former President Donald Trump is “manipulation,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said Monday.
Biden had a “missed opportunity” Sunday night to truly unite the country, Lee said during a panel discussion at The Heritage Foundation’s Policy Fest at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Lee’s accusation came two days after the shooting at a Trump campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A shooter with a rifle on a nearby roof wounded Trump in the right ear, critically wounded two rallygoers, and fatally shot a third before Secret Service agents shot and killed the gunman.
“My general rule of thumb is that when someone is speaking from a position of immense power, as [Biden] certainly is, a call for unity, unless it’s accompanied by a description, an explanation, a formula, a prescription for how you get to unity, something that actually can and does tend to unify people—if you don’t have that, then it’s manipulation,” Lee told Mollie Hemingway, editor in chief of The Federalist, in an onstage interview.
“It’s a passive-aggressive, backdoor way of saying, ‘Everyone unite behind me,’” Lee added.
The Utah Republican called Biden’s tactic “one of my pet peeves in politics.”
Lee also told Hemingway: “I think he had a real missed opportunity because … this is the kind of moment where a president of the United States can and should say, ‘Hey, let’s all get united at least around a couple of things, and here’s what those things are, and here’s what I’m going to do for my part in order to do that.’ I think that could have helped.”
One way Biden could “bring down the temperature,” Lee argued, would be to end his administration’s two criminal prosecutions of Trump, widely seen as political, and ask state-level prosecutors drop charges against the former president.
A Florida court partially granted Lee’s wish earlier Monday, dismissing the Justice Department’s classified documents case against Trump. Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, ruled that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment to prosecute the case was unconstitutional.
“It’s with good reason that the Constitution limits who can do what in the executive branch,” Lee, a lawyer who specializes in the Constitution, told Hemingway while discussing the ruling in Trump’s favor in Florida.
Lee said the Biden administration’s efforts to imprison Republicans’ chosen presidential candidate “is not the sort of thing we expect from the United States.”
In a Sunday night address to the nation on the attempt to kill Trump, Biden said “there is no place in America for this kind of violence,” adding that “unity is the most elusive goal right now.”