by Victor Davis Hanson
When faced with the possible return of former President Donald Trump, the current agenda of the Democratic Party is summed up simply as “We had to destroy democracy to save it.”
The effort shares a common theme: Any means necessary are justified to prevent the people from choosing their own president, given the fear that a majority might vote to elect Donald Trump.
Sometimes the anti-democratic paranoia has been outsourced to state and local officials and prosecutors to erase Donald Trump from the primary and likely general election ballots as well.
One unelected official in Maine, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, is a Democrat, an official never elected by the people, and a non-lawyer rendering a legal edict. Yet she has judged President Trump guilty of “insurrection.”
And presto, she erased his name from the state’s ballot.
Yet President Trump was never charged, much less convicted, of “insurrection.”
The statute Bellows cites is a post-Civil War clause of the 14th Amendment. It was passed over a century and a half ago. It was never intended to be used in an election year by an opposition party to disbar a rival presidential candidate.
In the earlier case of Colorado, the all-Democrat Supreme Court, in a 4-3 vote, took President Trump off the ballot.
In sum, just five officials in two states have taken away the rights of some 7 million Americans to vote for the president of their choice.
Note that President Trump continues to lead incumbent President Joe Biden in the polls.
Sometimes, indictments are preferred to prevent Americans from voting for or against President Trump.
Currently, four leftist prosecutors—three state and one federal—have indicted President Trump.
They are petitioning courts to accelerate the usually lethargic legal process to ensure President Trump is tied up in Atlanta, Miami, New York, and Washington, D.C. courtrooms nonstop during the 2024 election cycle.
Their aim is to keep President Trump from campaigning, as he faces four left-wing prosecutors, four liberal judges, and four or five overwhelmingly Democratic jury pools.
Yet all the indictments are increasingly clouded in controversy, if not outright scandal.
Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis campaigned on promises to get President Trump. She now faces allegations that she outsourced the prosecution to an unqualified personal injury lawyer—her current stealth boyfriend who was paid handsomely by Willis’s office and traveled on pricey junkets with her.
New York partisan Attorney General Letitia James likewise sought office on promises to destroy President Trump.
She preposterously claims President Trump overvalued his real estate collateral to a bank. Yet it eagerly made the loan, profited from it, and had no complaints given that President Trump paid off the principle and interest as required.
Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg is even more desperate. He is now prosecuting President Trump for campaign finance violations from nearly a decade ago, claiming a nondisclosure agreement with a purported sexual liaison somehow counts as a campaign violation.
Federal special prosecutor Jack Smith claims President Trump should be convicted of improperly removing classified documents after leaving office. In the past, such disagreements over presidential papers were resolved bureaucratically.
Biden, for example, improperly took out classified files after leaving the Senate and vice presidency and stored them in unsecure locations for over a decade.
All of these prosecutors are unapologetic anti-Trump progressives.
Some have communicated with the White House legal eagles, even though Biden is likely to face President Trump in the November election.
Some prosecutors are themselves facing controversies, if not scandals. Some wish to synchronize their drawn-out investigations and indictments to hinder the Trump reelection effort.
At other times, the effort to neuter President Trump is waged by his rival Biden himself.
He has hammered President Trump as an insurrectionist and guilty of a number of egregious crimes against democracy—even as Biden’s own attorney general has appointed a special counsel to try President Trump on just those federal charges concerning the January 6 demonstrations, a dead horse that Biden periodically still beats to death to scare voters.
Biden periodically smears half of America who supported or voted for President Trump as “ultra-Maga” extremists and “semi-fascists” who would destroy democracy.
Yet the more President Biden and the Left weaponize the judicial system to prevent President Trump from running, and the more President Biden screams and yells that Trump supporters are anti-American and anti-democratic, the more President Trump soars in the polls while President Biden sinks.
The Left privately knows that its historically unprecedented strangulation of democracy is increasing Trump’s popularity. But like an addict, it cannot quit its Trump fix.
In sum, the Left is creating historic, anti-democratic precedents that will someday boomerang on Democrats should Republicans win the November election and follow the new Democrat model of extra-legal politics.
Democrats are tearing apart the country in a manner not seen since the Civil War era—apparently convinced democracy cannot be trusted and so itself must be sacrificed as the price of destroying Trump.
First published in the Epoch Times.
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7 Responses
Friendly historical error correction service:
Wrong: “Democrats are tearing apart the country in a manner not seen since the Civil War era—”
Corrected: “Democrats are tearing apart the country in a manner not seen since they started the Civil War to defend slavery of black people—
The author should be more historically accurate in his polemics.
An old and tired tune sung by ignoramuses with no interest in the truth. Sure, moron, it was those solid Democrat states of New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut that fought tooth and nail for the right to keep their slaves. And it was the Republican states of Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas where outrage at slavery ran highest and that had to drag those recalcitrant Democrats kicking and screaming back into the Union.
It was the ancestors of today’s Biden supporters who enacted the Jim Crow laws. Their grandpas are the ones who carried out lynchings, and attacked blacks with water cannon, clubs, and dogs when they tried to stand up for their rights in such northern Democrat cities as Birmingham, New Jersey and Selma, Massachusetts. And it was a true-blue liberal from New York who cried “Segregation Forever!”
All of that is the truth, and you totally aren’t an intellectually dishonest loser.
You forgot to tell that ignorant person about all the Republican Confederates, Dennis.
You don’t have to pretend to be somebody else, it’s obvious you’re the same loser.
A better title would be “Sacrificing Language to destroy Democracy”
Consider what we have been led to believe these past few years:-
– Violent riots in which innocent bystanders die are “mostly peaceful”.
– A vice-president of the US who incites rioters to continue their violent rampaging through cities is performing a “laudable defence of victims of racism”.
– Unarmed protesters, the vast majority of whom are peaceful and ushered into the Capitol by the building’s police, are violent “insurrectionists” attempting to “overthrow the republic”.
– A leading J6 provocateur caught red-handed on video inciting people to enter the Capitol suffers no real legal consequences because he’s a “victim”.
– Blockading the private homes of the judges of the Supreme court of the United States of America and harassing their families for months is perfectly acceptable if placed in the “context of abortion”.
– Rampant inflation is actually the amazing strategy of “Bidenomics”, the beauty of which the public are simply too stupid to acknowledge.
– Open borders which allow millions of illegal immigrants to enter the US are “legal” but turning away qualified people who apply for citizenship is observing the legality of “current immigration policy”.
– The exposure of persistent high-level corruption leading all the way up to the president is a “conspiracy theory without evidence”.
– Removing uncharged political opponents from the ballot is a “constitutional right”.
– Parents attempting to protect their children from sexual marauders are labelled “domestic terrorists”
– Widespread censorship is to be applauded in the name of combatting “hate speech”
– Systematically lying to the public via mass media is necessary to preserve “our democracy”.
And so on. Go figure!
Excellent post.
@arthur c.: just because the unattended-to-truths annoy you is no excuse to awaken us.