Republican Senator Mitt Romney, former presidential candidate in the United States, strongly accused Donald Trump of having contributed to a political climate “filled with hatred” before an election that the world watches “with horror”, while sparing his Democratic opponent Joe Biden.
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Coming out of a certain reserve three weeks before the presidential election of November 3, the unsuccessful candidate of 2012 says he is “troubled” by the turn that the American political debate is taking, plunged into “an abominable, abusive and hate-filled slump which is unseemly for a free country, and even more so for the cradle of modern democracy ”.
The senator believes that those responsible lie with Republicans as well as Democrats.
But the choice of examples tends to show that President Trump, a candidate of his own Republican camp for a second term, is particularly singled out. It lists several very recent statements by the billionaire against the Democrats.
“The president calls the Democratic candidate for vice-president (Kamala Harris) a ‘monster’; he repeatedly calls the Speaker of the House of Representatives (Nancy Pelosi) “crazy”; he calls on the Department of Justice to put the previous president (Barack Obama) in prison; he attacks the governor of Michigan the very day a project to remove her is unveiled, ”denounces Mitt Romney in a message on Twitter.
In contrast, Democrats, accused of “also launching scathing attacks”, seem less targeted. Especially since the influential elected, who regularly criticizes Donald Trump and has never clearly called to vote for him, even specifies that the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden “refuses to lower himself to the level of others”.
Regarding the opposition, Mitt Romney criticizes only the fact that Nancy Pelosi “tore up the President’s State of the Union speech live on television,” an episode that dates back to the beginning of the year. And a recent video in which a political and sports commentator close to the left, Keith Olbermann, calls Donald Trump a “terrorist”.
“These rabid attacks”, “amplified by the media on the right and on the left”, “stir up the peddlers of conspiracy theories,” laments the senator.
“The world looks at America with horror tinged with contempt,” he adds, saying that “many Americans are afraid” for their own country, “so divided, so angry, so mean, so violent”.
“It’s time to turn the heat down. The leaders must lower their tone, ”he insists.