Joe Biden invoked the Capitol riot during his State of the Union address on Tuesday: “And two years ago, our democracy faced its greatest threat since the Civil War.” He’s made this analogy between the Civil War and the Capitol riot before. The two events are vastly different in terms of their cause, scale, and consequence. Even suggesting the two are comparable is absurd, especially considering that over 600,000 Americans died in the war. Only one person died as a direct result of the violence from the Capital riot.
Later, Biden added, “In the last few years, our democracy has been threatened and attacked, put at risk—put to the test this very room on January the 6th.”
Another problem with Biden’s claim is that the Capitol riot was not an “insurrection” or an “attack on democracy” as widely claimed by Joe Biden and the left. But Harvard’s Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center published a study last year debunking this claim. According to the analysis, most of the rioters were motivated by loyalty to President Trump, The study found that 20.6% were there because they supported Trump. Another 20.6% cited the belief that the 2020 presidential election had been rigged.
“The documents show that Trump and his allies convinced an unquantifiable number of Americans that representative democracy in the United States was not only in decline but in imminent, existential danger,” the study explains. “This belief translated into a widespread fear of democratic and societal breakdown, which, in turn, motivated hundreds of Americans to travel to DC from far corners of the country in what they were convinced was the nation’s most desperate hour.”
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The January 6 Capitol riot may not have been an attack on democracy, but the efforts of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Obama administration, which included Joe Biden, to delegitimize Donald Trump’s presidency with bogus allegations of Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election did far more to damage faith in our democracy than the Capitol riot did.
But even if Biden believes that the riot was an “attack on democracy,” was it worse than the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, or the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001? Biden also seems to ignore the various assassinations or assassination attempts on democratically elected presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.
The U.S. Capitol has been the site of violence many times in recent decades, as USA Today previously documented— a fact that Biden has either forgotten or ignored.
