The Travesties of the Trump Trials

 

The Travesties of the Trump Trials

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season.

These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.

Indeed, the nation is by now worn out by these serial assaults on constitutional norms: the Hillary-funded Steele dossier subterfuge; the pre-election Russian laptop disinformation campaign; the two impeachments without special counsel reports; the impeachment Senate trial of a private citizen; the effort to remove Trump’s name from state ballots; the ongoing attempt to emasculate the Electoral College; or the radical opportune changes in state election laws to ensure massive mail-in balloting.

Recently, Andrew McCarthy has reviewed in depth this coordination between White House personnel and prosecutors, long known and long denied by the left. Biden, for example, had complained to aides about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tardiness in getting special federal prosecutor Smith appointed—and thus apparently ensuring Trump was convicted before the election.

Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’s now-fired paramour prosecutor, visited and consulted with the White House counsel’s office when he was acting supposedly as a purely local county prosecutor. The January 6th left-wing-dominated congressional committee consulted with the Biden administration in sending forth its criminal referrals about Trump’s purported role in the protests. And to handle his pseudo-indictment against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hired Biden Justice Department official Vincent Colangeio.

Two, the prosecutors’ delayed criminal indictments and E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit were predicated only on Donald Trump running for reelection. After his 2020 defeat, the loss of the two Republican senate seats in Georgia, and the January 6 demonstrations/riot, Trump was written off by pundits as politically toxic.

Then his historic comeback in the subsequent year terrified the left. The reboot prompted the subsequent indictments and suits years after the purported crimes. It was left unsaid that had Trump not been a conservative Republican and leading presidential candidate, he would have never been indicted.

Three, most of the indictments either had no prior precedent in criminal law or will likely never be used again, at least against anyone left-wing. Moreover, many of the writs relied on manipulation of statutes of limitations.

Neither Bragg nor any other local prosecutor had previously transformed a supposedly local affidavit misdemeanor into a supposed federal campaign finance violation, a gambit so preposterous that it had been passed on by federal attorneys.

Letitia James was the first New York Attorney General to indict a state resident for the supposed crime of overvaluing real estate to obtain a loan, which was paid back timely and in full, to the profit of lending institutions. No bank, after auditing Trump’s assets and viability to pay back loans, was unhappy to loan to him. But all were quite happy to profit from the hefty interest—and would likely be happy to loan to him again.

James sought to make Trump a criminal without ever finding a crime, much less a victim. Nor, until the checkered and unethical career of Fani Willis, had any local prosecutor ever indicted an ex-president for a supposedly improper phone call questioning whether all the state’s votes had been fully counted.

Alvin Bragg’s case was nonexistent given the statute of limitations on supposed misdemeanors committed over six years prior—until Bragg transmogrified the accusations of minor crimes into felonies and, with them, extensions granted supposedly due to the COVID lockdowns.

In Carroll’s case, her unsubstantiated accusations of a sexual assault were also well past the statute of limitations until a left-wing New York legislator and unapologetic Trump hater passed a special law—a veritable bill of attainder aimed at Trump—waiving the statute of limitations for a year in cases of accusations of long-past sexual assault in the state of New York.

Four, all the indictments and suits took place in either blue cities, counties, or states. And most of the jury pools in or near New York, Atlanta, or Miami were or will be heavily Democrat. So far, the New York judges who have overseen Trump’s civil and criminal trials—Justices Engoron, Kaplan, and Merchan—were all liberals, appointed by Democrat or liberal politicians, and some have donated to Democrat causes. They were not shy about expressing disdain for defendant Trump. No changes in venues were ever allowed.

Five, all the prosecutors, Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis, are likewise either Democrats or associated with liberal causes. In the case of Bragg, James, and Willis, all three ran for office and raised money on promises and boasts of getting Donald Trump. And all three have now set the precedent that local and state prosecutors can warp the law and use it to go after an ex-president and leading presidential candidate of the opposite party for naked political purposes.

Six, all these cases were equally applicable to high-profile Democrat politicos. E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit was the most laughable of all the court dramas, but its outline and protocols just as easily could have applied to Tara Reade. She came forward to accuse candidate Biden of having sexually assaulted her years earlier—roughly about the same period’s as Carroll’s fluid timelines. Her story is about as believable or unbelievable as Carroll’s. But the difference was that whereas the media canonized the delusional and self-contradictory Carroll as a useful anti-Trump tool, it demonized Reade as a crazy loon and liar—and a potential impediment to Biden’s 2019-20 primary campaign.

Bragg had to torture the law to fabricate a federal campaign finance indictment against Trump. But Hillary Clinton clearly violated federal campaign statutes—and was variously fined—when she tried to hide her “opposition research” payments to Christopher Steele as “legal expenses.” In truth, Steele was hired and paid to concoct a fake anti-Trump dossier and likely should have been barred from working for a presidential campaign given he was not a U.S. citizen.

In the case of Smith, simultaneously with his case against Trump, his twin special prosecutor, Robert Hur, found that Joe Biden had unlawfully removed classified files for much longer than Trump (30 years plus), in a much less secure location (his rickety garage), and without a president’s authority to declassify his documents. Moreover, he had disclosed their contents to his ghostwriter, who destroyed evidence under subpoena by Hur. Yet unlike Trump, Biden was not charged, given that Hur claimed that Biden, in his opinion, was so old and amnesiac that he might win sympathy rather than a conviction from a jury.

Willis indicted Trump for supposedly trying to pressure officials to “find” missing Trump ballots, thus supposedly violating “racketeering” statutes, as he oversaw an attempt to find troves of ballots he thought had been cast for him. Of course, in the same state, Stacy Abrams, after losing the gubernatorial race of 2018, claimed she had actually won, despite losing by over 50,000 votes. She sued to overturn the election and then made a celebrity-political career touring the nation, falsely claiming she was the real governor and her victorious opponent was an illegitimate governor.

For that matter, in 2016, left-wing organizations, celebrities, and thousands of political operatives sought to overturn the Trump victory by appealing to the electors to renounce their states’ popular vote tallies and thus become “faithless electors.” In sum, there was a true conspiracy, or, better, a “racketeering” scheme, to use Willis’s parlance, to coordinate various groups to overturn the constitutional duties of electors to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. Clinton, along with the likes of ex-president Jimmy Carter and soon-to-be House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, would continue to deny that Trump was the legitimately elected president.

In sum, the number of suits against and indictments against Trump grew in correlation to his political fortunes. They were designed in the election year 2024 to do what Democrat voters likely cannot. They are ridiculous and sui generis, and will never be used against anyone other than Trump. They have done more damage to democracy, the rule of law, and equal justice to the law than all of the antics that Trump is accused of.

Moreover, they will set in motion a dangerous tit-for-tat cycle of weaponization that threatens the very constitutional order of the United States.

If Trump is elected to restore the rule of equal justice, will a Republican special counsel revisit Robert Hur’s work and find ex-President Biden quite capable of standing trial for the crimes Hur has already investigated and confirmed?

Will then a new Republican-appointed FBI director order a SWAT-like raid, with Fox News forewarned and Newsmax reporters on the scene, to descend into the Biden beach house?

Will county and state prosecutors in Utah, Montana, and Oklahoma feel that to stop this cycle of illegality, they must charge the Biden family members by bootstrapping local indictments onto federal crimes?

Will conservative women in the future come forward in Arkansas, Idaho, and Alabama to claim that in their past, they now suddenly remember that decades ago a prominent Democrat candidate harassed them? Will their right-wing lawyers cherry-pick the proper red-state judge?

Will conservative district attorneys find ways to indict Joe Biden on the various imaginative bookkeeping and “loan repayments” used to disguise the fact his corrupt family received well over $20 million from illiberal foreign interests, much if not all of it camouflaged to avoid income taxes?

Will some South Carolina legislator get a bill of attainder passed in the legislature, ending the statute of limitations for a year for all those in 2016 who sought to undermine the electors and flip them to Hillary Clinton?

In August or September, will a right-wing state prosecutor and a conservative judge find that Joe Biden’s creative bookkeeping warrants a $450 million fine, payable before appeal?

And will Republican officials and judges in purple states move to get Biden’s name off the ballot?

Such scenarios are endless and, given the current precedents, could all be justified as desperate deterrent measures to shock the left into ceasing their efforts to sabotage our constitutional system and rule of law.

A final note. There is a divine order of balance in the world, one known variously by particular civilizations as kismet, nemesis, karma, or what goes around, comes around payback. We’ve already seen such forces at work: Sen. Schumer at the head of a mob at the doors of the Supreme Court, calling out threats to justices by name, only now finding pro-Hamas thugs circling his own home. Or Democrats during the Trump years straining to find ways to invoke the 25th Amendment, now humiliated into claiming a non-compos-mentis Joe Biden is “sharp as a knife.”

Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared.

Coming soon to a Campus Near You: Nazi Germany Redux!

Coming soon to a campus near you: Nazi German Redux!

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

If you think this is hyperbole then think again.

What is happening on university campuses in America today -- save the attire and some of the rhetoric -- is identic to what happened with the nationalist socialists in Germany during the early 1930s.

For as in Nazi Germany, the goal is to intimidate and, if necessary, terrorize Jews so as to purge them from the campus.

And as in Nazi Germany, all the university leadership has to do is nothing. They do not need to either participate or support this sickness. They can even bemoan the hatred in public.

They just need to let the militant "storm troopers" run their course and the Jewish problem on campus will be solved.

Same outcome, different format.

And another "smashing" victory for the advocates of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion!  

China must pay for its mass murder

China must pay for its mass murder by fueling America’s fentanyl overdose epidemic

William Barr, New York Post 

A report from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party revealed that China has been directly fueling the US fentanyl crisis.

The mass importation of Chinese fentanyl is slaughtering Americans at an annual rate equal to that of our bloodiest year in World War II.

China is actively encouraging and facilitating this campaign of mass murder — as the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party revealed Tuesday in a bombshell bipartisan report.

It is a euphemism to call the mass distribution of fentanyl “drug trafficking.”

Fentanyl is a deadly poison. The tiniest amount is lethal.

It is typically distributed in disguised form so people who take it think they’re taking prescription drugs, such as Percocet, Xanax or Adderall.

Even when a drug is taken as an opioid, its victims have no idea it contains a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl.

Trafficking fentanyl is outright murder.

It is like shooting randomly into a crowd.

Those who ply and enable this trade know with moral certainty they are killing people on a mass scale.

The scale of carnage is intolerable and getting worse.

Drug overdose deaths stand at 112,000 a year and continue to climb — the vast majority attributable to fentanyl.

And this is not the only damage done.

A congressional report found the opioid crisis, largely fentanyl-fueled, cost America nearly $1.5 trillion in 2020 — 7% of gross domestic product.

The United States has long known China is the source of the fentanyl slaughtering Americans.

It produces 97% of the illicit fentanyl precursors essential to making it.

There’s no practical alternative source for the volume of precursors necessary.

Simply put, without China’s production and export of fentanyl and fentanyl precursors, there would be no fentanyl crisis.

But there has been a question about the government’s and party’s precise role.

Has this been an illicit business carried on by Chinese organized crime and corrupt businessmen, with the government simply reluctant to help stop what it sees as primarily an American problem?

Or is this effectively an intentional program to wreak havoc in the United States, given impetus, support and encouragement by China and the CCP?

Thanks to the select committee’s trailblazing work, we have a much clearer picture.

Its meticulous report presents detailed and convincing evidence that Beijing and the CCP are not just bystanders — they are the prime movers behind fentanyl’s mass importation into America.

Committee investigators found a hidden Chinese-government website that offers complete tax rebates incentivizing the export of all fentanyl analogues and precursors, as well as other synthetic narcotics — drugs illegal in China and America and without any legitimate purpose.

These rebates allow Chinese drug companies to effectively operate tax free when they make and export fentanyl precursors.

What conceivable basis could there be for the Chinese government to incentivize the production and export of these illegal drugs, knowing they are bound for the United States, where they will kill more than 200 Americans a day?

The committee also learned Beijing provides grants and awards to companies engaging in open and notorious synthetic-narcotics manufacturing and drug-trafficking.

And it discovered the government has ownership stakes in certain Chinese chemical companies exporting significant amounts of illicit fentanyl products, as well as publicly traded Chinese companies that openly and notoriously host on their websites illicit drugs for sale to Americans.

Tellingly, in contrast to China’s aggressive prosecution of domestic drug-traffickers — Chinese media regularly cover executions of such traffickers — the committee found no sign it’s pursued cases involving illegal export of narcotics.

This, despite Western law enforcement supplying compelling evidence of violations and despite China’s notorious system of intense social surveillance and control.

Beijing’s role in producing and exporting illicit drugs dovetails with the emergence of Chinese organized crime as the principal financiers and money-launderers for the drug cartels.

The CCP has been tightening its alliance with Chinese organized crime to gain influence outside China, and US law enforcement investigating Chinese money-laundering have found evidence indicating some schemes involved Chinese government officials and the Communist Party elite, per the committee report.

Some may find it hard to believe a modern state would be so complicit in the campaign of mass murder against another country’s citizens.

But the committee’s work provides powerful evidence it is.

As we try to defend our country against the deadly drug onslaught — not just fentanyl but now new generations of hideous Chinese drugs like nitazenesand xylazine (“tranqs”) — we must understand what we’re dealing with.

The Chinese have not been acting in good faith.

The idea they’re willing to cooperate with us in combating drug-trafficking is delusional.

China is one of the most pervasive police states on the planet.

It has the capacity to shut down the production and export of illicit narcotics.

But Beijing will not move to do so unless it understands there will be severe economic consequences — including sanctions — if it continues its complicity in the mass poisoning of American citizens.

William Barr is a Hudson Institute distinguished fellow and author of the memoir “One Damn Thing After Another.” He served as US attorney general, 1991-93 and 2019-20. 

California can’t account for $24B spent on homeless

 

Go Steve... 

California GOP leaders call for accountability after state can’t account for $24B spent on homeless crisis

The state auditor found that despite roughly $24 billion spent on homeless and housing programs during the 2018-2023 fiscal years, the problem didn’t improve in many cities

Bradford Betz, Fox News

California GOP leaders are calling for more accountability after an audit released earlier this week indicated that the state spent around $24 billion to tackle the homeless crisis over the past five years but did not consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money did anything to actually improve the problem. 

The state auditor’s report found that despite roughly $24 billion spent on homeless and housing programs during the 2018-2023 fiscal years, the problem didn’t improve in many cities, according to the state auditor’s report.

Among other things, the report found that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal ICH), which is responsible for coordinating agencies and allocating resources for the homelessness programs, stopped tracking whether the programs were working in 2021. 

It also failed to collect and evaluate outcome data for these programs due to the lack of a consistent method, the audit found. 

California Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher laid the blame squarely on the Newsom administration. 

"This is standard Gavin Newsom – make a splashy announcement, waste a bunch of taxpayer money, and completely fail to deliver," Gallagher said in a statement to Fox News Digital. 

"Californians are tired of the homeless crisis, and they’re even more tired of Gavin’s excuses. We need results – period, full stop." 

Republican state Sen. Roger Niello has called the audit "troubling" but told Fox News Digital he "wasn't terribly surprised. 

"The one issue I had with the audit was that the focus was mostly on housing and shelter issues, which is certainly important, but really very little about actual results, getting people out of homelessness, not just into shelter," he said. "That's sort of half the job, maybe not even quite half the job. And, so that was a little bit of a disappointment." 

Democratic state Sen. Dave Cortese, who requested the audit last year after touring a large homeless encampment in San Jose, said the audit "highlights the need for improved data and greater transparency at both the state and local levels." 

"Unfortunately, there is a balkanized approach to data collection and outcomes, with no centralized system for tracking our investments," he said. "This audit underscores the urgent need to establish best practices and create a blueprint for how the State of California and our cities can address our most visible challenge." 

Former MLB All-Star Steve Garvey, who is running against Rep. Adam Schiff in California’s U.S. Senate race as a Republican, said it would take "real political courage to make necessary changes." 

"Since day one, I’ve advocated for a federal audit of California’s homelessness crisis," he said. "I’m glad that the state has done this, but now we need real political courage to make necessary changes. Our unhoused people and our taxpayers deserve real results, not more failed policies." 

Despite the audit’s findings, Cal ICH said it has made improvements in data collection after AB 977 took effect on January 1, 2023. The law requires that grantees of state-funded homelessness programs to enter specific data elements related to individuals and families into their local Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). 

Still, Cal ICH is shifting blame to local governments, saying these municipalities must be held more accountable as they are the ones "primarily responsible for implementing these programs and collecting data on outcomes that the state can use to evaluate program effectiveness." 

"The Council continues to improve its ability to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent judiciously and effectively, including by providing technical support to local jurisdictions to help align data standards and reporting," Cal ICH said. 

Why Are They Destroying Us?

 

Why Are They Destroying Us?

Victor Davis Hanson,X @VDHanson

If someone wished to destroy America, could he do anything more catastrophic than what we currently see and hear each day? What would an existential enemy do that we have not already done to ourselves?

Here are eleven now familiar steps to civilizational destruction:

1) Wipe out a 2,000 mile border. Allow 10-million foreign nationals to enter unlawfully. Have no audit of any; nullify all federal immigration laws. Let toxic drugs in that kill 100,000 Americans a year. Give free support for those millions who broke the law. Smear any objectors as racists and xenophobes.

2) Run up $35 trillion in national debt. Keep adding $1 trillion to it each 100 days. Defame anyone wishing to cut wild spending as cruel and inhumane.

3). Appease or subsidize enemies like Iran and China. Demonize allies like Israel. Allow terrorists to attack Americans without response. See Islam as either similar or superior to Christianity. Make amends to leftist governments for supposedly past toxic American international behavior. Follow the lead of international agencies like the UN, ICC, and WHO to atone forpast American neocolonial and imperialist behavior. Recede to second-tier international status, befitting American decline.

4) In a multiracial democracy, redefine identity only as one’s tribal affiliation. Ensure each identity group rivals the other for victimhood and the state spoils it confers. Redefine all political issues by race and sex oppressors and oppressed. Destroy all meritocratic standards of admission, retention, promotion, and commendation.

5) Redefine violent crime as understandable, cry-of-the-heart expressions of social justice. Ensure no bail and same-day release for arrested, repeat violent felons. Empathize with the violent killer and rapist; ignore their victims, especially if slain police-officers

6). Emasculate the military by using non-meritocratic standards of race, gender, and sexual orientation to determine promotion and commendation. Deliberately smear as racists and insurrectionists the largest demographic in the military who in recent wars died at twice their numbers in the population—so that they leave or never join the military. Encourage retired high officers to slander their Commander-in-Chief. Cut the defense budget. Stop producing sufficient weapons, but leave billions of dollars’ worth of arms to terrorists.

7) Reinvent the justice system to indict, bankrupt, convict, jail and eliminate political opponents. Use ballot removal, impeachment, civil suits, and state and federal indictments rather than elections to defeat an opponent. Mob the homes of non-compliant Supreme Court Justices, attack them personally by name.

8) Encourage the fusion of the bureaucratic state with the electric media to form a powerful force for political audit, surveillance, censorship, and coercion. Marry the FBI to Silicon Valley and hire its contractors to warp the news and hound supposed enemies of the people.

9.) Make war on affordable gasoline and natural gas. Substitute inefficient, unreliable, and expensive wind and solar power, even as energy prices bankrupt the middle class.

10.) Marry late, but preferably not at all. Consider males toxic, especially boys. Have no children, or as few as possible. Otherwise, assure children they are entitled, and must be sheltered.  Raise them to have grievances against past generations and current norms.

11.) Turn world-class universities into indoctrination centers. Suspend the Bill of Rights on campuses. Train youth to graduate despising their own culture and civilization. Recruit foreign students from hostile nations to subsidize campus commissarbloat. Replace the curriculum with therapeutic propaganda. Ban the SAT/ACT and do not evaluate high school GPAs. Ensure merit does not select the student body. Charge tuition higher than the rate of inflation. Bill the government when students default on their loans.

So why are those controlling Biden using him to advance much of such a destructive agenda that would end America as we know it?

1) They are delusional and think their socialist and globalist agendas are working and will save us.

2) They are raging nihilists who do not like the U.S. and deliberately want it destroyed as a service to the world. A ruined U.S. is preferable to a strong America.

3) They are Jacobin revolutionaries who are intentionally erasing the old United States as a prerequisite for creating an entirely new America that will arise from the ashes with no trace or even memory of its past.

4) They have no agenda. They are aimless fools, and utter incompetents. These bunglers just wing it day-to-day, in response to what their radical media, academic, and political masters dictate is necessary for them to retain power. They have no idea of the damage they are doing.

5. A bit of 1-3, but probably not 4.

The Cut Flowers Civilization

 

The Cut Flowers Civilization

Ben Shapiro, Jewish World Review 

This week, famed atheist Richard Dawkins explained that he was a "cultural Christian." Praising his civilization, Dawkins stated, "I do think that we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian. I'm not a believer. But there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian. And so you know I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense." Dawkins went on to praise Christianity as a "fundamentally decent religion in a way that I think Islam is not."

Dawkins' case for Christianity — a case made on the basis of utility — is nothing new. It was made long ago by acidic critic of the church Voltaire, who famously averred, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." But the problem with the utilitarian case for religious belief is that it doesn't animate religious believers. It is simply impossible to build a civilization on the basis of Judeo-Christian foundations while making the active case as to why those foundations ought to be dissolved.

In fact, Western civilization has doomed itself so long as it fails to reconnect to its religious roots. Philosopher Will Herberg wrote, "The moral principles of Western civilization are, in fact, all derived from the tradition rooted in Scripture and have vital meaning only in the context of that tradition. ... Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice and personal dignity — the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality."

We are a cut flowers civilization.

And eventually, cut flowers die.

That has never been more obvious than this week, when the Biden administration decided to honor the newly invented Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday. Gender ideology is a symptom of our society's reversion to gnostic paganism, in which unseen, chaotic forces buffet us about, and in which nature is directly opposed to the freedom of our disembodied essences. It is no wonder that gender ideology is opposed by every mainstream traditional religion.

Yet claiming that this magical holiday could not be moved, the White House issued a variety of statements in celebration of radical gender ideology, including the deeply insulting statement from the president of the United States citing the book of Genesis to the effect that transgender people are "made in the image of God" — ignoring the last half of the Biblical verse, which reads, "male and female he made them." What better time than Easter, the holiest day in the Christian calendar, to pay homage to an entirely new religion?

Richard Dawkins is obviously correct that a civilization rooted in church is better than a civilization rooted in an alternative set of values. But in reality, the churches cannot be empty; they must be full. The cathedrals that mean Britain to Dawkins must ring with the sounds of hymns in order to maintain their holiness and their importance; otherwise, they are merely beautiful examples of old architecture, remnants of a dead civilization preserved in stone.

But our civilization must live. And that means more than cultural Christianity. It means reengaging with the source of our values — the Scriptures that educated our fathers and grandfathers.

Deception, Treachery and Buffoonery

Biden's Easter = Bunnies and Rainbows

 ‘I Didn’t Do That’: Biden Responds to Criticism for Proclaiming Easter Sunday Transgender Visibility Day

The president’s proclamation has sparked an uproar among Republicans and conservatives.

Emel Akan, The Epoch Times 

WASHINGTON—President Joe Biden on April 1 pushed back against criticism of his proclamation on the weekend in support of transgender people, which coincided with Easter.

Treachery

“I didn’t do that,” President Biden said in response to a question from the press about his issuing the proclamation.

When asked about House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) criticism of the proclamation, the president replied that “he’s thoroughly uninformed.”

The president’s responses came during the annual White House Easter Egg Roll he hosted along with First Lady Jill Biden on the South Lawn.

President Biden declared March 31, which fell on Easter Sunday, as “Transgender Day of Visibility,” sparking an uproar among Republicans and conservatives.

Mr. Johnson called it “outrageous,” while former President Donald Trump’s campaign demanded that President Biden apologize to millions of Christians in the United States.

“The Biden White House has betrayed the central tenet of Easter—which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” Mr. Johnson wrote on March 30 on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Banning sacred truth and tradition—while at the same time proclaiming Easter Sunday as ‘Transgender Day’—is outrageous and abhorrent. The American people are taking note.”

President Biden said in the March 29 proclamation that his administration wanted to send a message that transgender people are part of American society.

“NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility,” the president’s proclamation reads.

President Biden highlighted the appointment of transgender individuals in leadership positions within his administration, as well as the lifting of the ban that previously prevented them from openly serving in the military.

He also touted his administration’s efforts to make public services more accessible for transgender Americans, including making official documents such as passports more “inclusive” by including an X as the gender marker.

Karoline Leavitt, President Trump’s national press secretary, described the proclamation as “the Biden administration’s years-long assault on the Christian faith.”

“We call on Joe Biden’s failing campaign and White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe tomorrow is for one celebration only—the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” Ms. Leavitt said in a March 30 statement.

Deception

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre slammed the criticisms, calling them “dishonest” and “hateful.”

“On March 31, Transgender Day of Visibility is marked. And as we know—for folks who understand the calendar and how it works—Easter falls on different Sundays every year. And this year, it happened to coincide with Transgender Visibility Day. And so that is the simple fact,” she said.

“As a Christian who celebrates Easter with family, President Biden stands for bringing people together and upholding the dignity and freedoms of every American.

“President Biden will never abuse his faith for political purposes or for profit.”

President Biden delivered brief remarks on April 1, welcoming guests to the South Lawn for the annual Easter Egg Roll. The tradition began in 1878, when President Rutherford B. Hayes invited children to the White House for Easter and egg rolling on the lawn.

“You know, it began in 1878 because they wanted to have an Easter egg roll on the park grounds, but they weren’t allowed to do it. So, the president then said, ‘Let’s have it on the White House lawn.’ They couldn’t stop that. It’s been going on since then,” President Biden said in his remarks.

“Easter reminds us of the power of hope and renewal, sacrifice and resurrection, but mainly love and grace toward one another.”

Emel Akan is a senior White House correspondent for The Epoch Times, where she covers the Biden administration. Prior to this role, she covered the economic policies of the Trump administration. Previously, she worked in the financial sector as an investment banker at JPMorgan. She graduated with a master’s degree in business administration from Georgetown University.