Ari Fleischer: De-legitimizing Your Political Opponent Is “Now On Steroids In The Trump Era”
On Fox Across America with Jimmy Failla, Fox News Contributor and former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer explained why the divide between the political left and right seems wider than ever.
“It’s been building for a decade or two. The animosity toward George Bush toward the end of his term where people called him a war criminal, etc., started to be the breakdown of the loyal opposition. It wasn’t enough to oppose and defeat. It was as if you had to de-legitimize those who you disagreed with. It accelerated during the Obama years. I think President Trump, and I said at the time, then Donald Trump’s attacks on Barack Obama for being born in Kenya, it was over the line. I criticized it when he said it. But this de-legitimization of people that we disagree with, which is now on steroids in the Trump era, where it was the left can’t understand that anybody of goodwill could be for Donald Trump. If you’re for him, you have to be a racist. There must be something wrong with you. You are deplorable. We have gone too far. America’s greatest strength is our reasonableness. We can have ideological gulfs between the left and the right. But we’ve always been united by a sense of we’re Americans first and we’re a loyal opposition. But where is the loyalty here? That was my point about as soon as Trump was elected, people said, I’m going to resist, not my President.”
