Sacrificing Democracy to Destroy Trump

Sacrificing Democracy to Destroy Trump
President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event at Montgomery County Community College, in Blue Bell, Pa., on Jan. 5, 2024. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Victor Davis Hanson
1/12/2024
Updated:
1/15/2024
0:00
Commentary

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 President Trump.

Sometimes, the anti-democratic paranoia has been outsourced to state and local officials and prosecutors to erase President 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 nonlawyer 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 more than 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 the former president.

Currently, four leftist prosecutors—three state and one federal—have indicted President Trump.

They’re petitioning courts to accelerate the usually lethargic legal process to ensure that the former president is tied up in Atlanta, Miami, New York, and District of Columbia 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 of 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’s partisan Attorney General Letitia James likewise sought office on promises to destroy the former president.

She preposterously claims that 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 the former president paid off the principle and interest as required.

Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg is even more desperate. He’s now prosecuting President Trump for campaign finance violations from nearly a decade ago, claiming that a nondisclosure agreement with a purported sexual liaison somehow counts as a campaign violation.

Federal special prosecutor Jack Smith claims that the former president should be convicted of improperly removing classified documents after leaving office. In the past, such disagreements over presidential papers were resolved bureaucratically.

President Biden, for example, improperly took out classified files after leaving the Senate and vice presidency and stored them in unsecure locations for more than a decade.

All of these prosecutors are unapologetic anti-Trump progressives.

Some have communicated with the White House legal eagles, even though President 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, President Biden himself.

He has hammered the former president as an insurrectionist and guilty of a number of egregious crimes against democracy—even as President Biden’s own attorney general has appointed a special counsel to try President Trump on just those federal charges concerning the Jan. 6 demonstrations, a dead horse that the president periodically still beats to death to scare voters.

President Biden periodically smears the half of Americans who supported or voted for President Trump as “ultra-Maga” extremists and “semi-fascists” who would destroy democracy.

Yet the more that President Biden and the left weaponize the judicial system to prevent President Trump from running, and the more the president screams and yells that Trump supporters are anti-American and anti-democratic, the more the former president soars in the polls while President Biden sinks.

The left privately knows that its historically unprecedented strangulation of democracy is increasing President Trump’s popularity. But like an addict, it can’t 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 extralegal politics.

Democrats are tearing apart the country in a manner not seen since the Civil War era—apparently convinced that democracy can’t be trusted and so itself must be sacrificed as the price of destroying President Trump.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian. He is a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, a senior fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University, a fellow of Hillsdale College, and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. Mr. Hanson has written 17 books, including “The Western Way of War,” “Fields Without Dreams,” “The Case for Trump,” and “The Dying Citizen.”
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