Lowry: Is Donald Trump still a quasi-Nazi?

The White House is now faced with a conundrum — how to make the case against Donald Trump as a quasi-Nazi while lowering the proverbial temperature after his near-assassination.

Joe Biden's Oval Office address calling for toning down the overheated rhetoric in our politics was fine as far as it went, except it included no mea culpa, no assurance that he'll try to do better himself, no recognition that his political and media allies have been the worst offenders.

Over-the-top attacks on Trump haven't been incidental to the Democratic 2024 campaign, but central to it. How else to distract attention from Biden's woeful record and marked decline? This is what Biden was getting at when he said — not knowing how it would sound soon thereafter — that "it's time to put Trump in a bull's-eye."

If Biden himself had been careful and responsible in his criticisms of Trump and Republicans, he would have been rendered practically mute the past few years.

Several years ago, he called the push for enhanced voter ID laws and the like in Republican states "the most serious test of our democracy since the Civil War," and characterized it as a "21st century Jim Crow assault" on voting rights. When voting reforms actually didn't end American democracy, he didn't go back and correct the record.

The focus, of course, has been Trump. In his unsettling and weird Philadelphia speech on "the soul of America" back in September 2022, Biden fulminated, "Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic."

He urged Democrats, independents and "mainstream" Republicans to be "stronger, more determined and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to destroying American democracy."

That's been relatively mild compared to how Trump has been routinely characterized by Biden's boosters as an American Hitler who will end our democracy and assassinate and imprison his critics with impunity if he's elected to a second term. This isn't the handiwork of fringe voices on social media or YouTube, but some of the most respected and established voices in the Democratic Party, from nearly everyone who appears on MSNBC to Hillary Clinton.

Even the policy agenda that Biden and his supporters are attributing to Trump, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, is being called "an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism and religious nationalism," as one Democratic congressman has put it.

On top of this, Joe Biden's Justice Department and his political allies have repeatedly indicted Donald Trump in hopes of taking him out politically and perhaps putting him in prison for the rest of his life, an unprecedented legal assault against a political opponent that has enormously raised the emotional and real stakes of 2024.

In his attempt to claw back from his catastrophic debate performance, Biden assailed Trump at a rally in Detroit just days ago as "a threat to this nation," as his supporters chanted, "Lock him up!" And the president won plaudits from his own side — this is what they want to hear and enjoy hearing.

It has all added up to a constant, deliberate attempt to keep the fear and hatred of Trump at a fever pitch, and portray the fight against him as literally existential. Who knows what, if any, effect this had on Trump's attempted assassin, who remains a blank slate.

Certainly, though, if the idea that Trump is just months away from overthrowing the Constitution and establishing a fascist regime in America is taken seriously and literally, it would justify any means of resistance. Regardless, after the horror of Butler, Pennsylvania, even Democrats say things have gotten too vitriolic. They'll just never admit their own responsibility.

Maybe Democrats could say they disagree with Trump's policies and hate what he did after the 2020 election without invoking Hitler, fascism or any number of other bogeymen that are false and inflammatory. If so, there's a first time for everything.