During an interview with CBS’ “Red & Blue,” on Monday, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) said President Joe Biden “has to stay the course” to fix his bad poll numbers and help Democrats going into the 2022 elections. He also argued that “The press all over this country needs to be exposing” former President Donald Trump, and “If we don’t have a democracy, free enterprise system, every business in this country is going under and we will have one autocrat making the decisions for everybody.”
Host Elaine Quijano asked, “Well, you speak with the president fairly regularly, his approval ratings have been declining since the United States withdrew from Afghanistan. What do you believe could reverse his poll numbers and boost Democrats’ prospects going into the midterms?”
Clyburn responded, “He has to stay the course. He is going through a rough patch like the country is. He’s going to come out of this on the other end in good shape, I think, provided that the people of goodwill in this society begin to speak up or stand up and speak out. We are shirking our responsibility. I’ve said, and I — in all due respect, when the former president of the United States says that the media, the press, if you please, is our — the enemy of the people, come on. Why would we let him say stuff like that and people just yell and cheer and we be quiet about it? The press all over this country needs to be exposing this stuff. And good people, we are celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday today, he told us, in his Letter from the Birmingham City Jail, that he was coming to the conclusion, that the people of ill will in our society are making a much better use of time than the people of goodwill. He also said to us that we cannot be silent when it comes to this. Martin Luther King Jr., in his letter, said we are going to be made to repent, not just for the vitriolic words and deeds of bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people. The good people of this country have got to break their silence, have got to speak out against this kind of undercutting of our democracy. If we don’t have a democracy, free enterprise system, every business in this country is going under and we will have one autocrat making the decisions for everybody. That is what I meant when I said that.”
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