by Victor Davis Hanson
When Donald Trump seemed certain to win the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that it could not count on people to do the “right thing” and elect the pending Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.
What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to take down candidate, then president, then former president, then candidate again, Donald Trump.
All these relentless efforts were justified by the slogan of “saving democracy” – although in practice this meant almost its destruction.
In 2015-16, Hillary Clinton’s campaign fueled the lie that discredited former British spy Christopher Steele had discovered that Donald Trump was an actual Russian agent.
Hillary didn’t disclose that she paid Steele — the checks were hidden behind three paywalls. The FBI, under Director James Comey, also hired a fraudster.
However, almost nothing in his “Steele dossier” was true.
The FBI falsified evidence submitted to FISA court. Comey leaked confidential documents to the press about his private conversations with President Trump.
Comey’s successor, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, repeatedly lied to federal investigators.
Former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have repeatedly lied when they claim that Trump is de facto cooperating with the Russians.
The result? Trump lost the 2016 popular election but still won the Electoral College.
Then celebrities and well-funded liberals waged a media campaign to convince voters to become “faithless.” Left-wing elites begged them to abandon their constitutional duties and instead hand the election to Hillary Clinton.
Since Trump’s election, the topic of “Russian collusion” has flared up hysterically again.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has consumed 22 months of Trump’s presidency, with his investigative team consistently releasing false information about the “walls closing in” around Trump.
After nearly two years, Mueller announced there was no evidence Trump tried to collude with Russia.
Then came Trump’s first impeachment trial — almost as soon as he lost the 2018 House election.
Trump reportedly wanted to exploit Ukraine to investigate corrupt Hunter Biden, delaying foreign aid.
Trump was impeached on a purely partisan vote.
But later, no one denied that drug addict Hunter Biden had indeed enriched himself in Ukraine, or that Joe Biden had fired a Ukrainian prosecutor who had investigated his son’s adventures when he was still vice president, or that Trump had withdrawn all military aid designated by Congress, or that he had included offensive weapons that the Obama-Biden administration had previously denied to Ukraine.
Then, in 2020, when Hunter’s laptop was found abandoned in a repair shop and riddled with incriminating evidence of further Biden family machinations, the left struck again.
“51 former intelligence officials” were assembled to mislead Americans on the eve of the vote that the laptop was likely a imitation — once again fabricated by Russian disinformation experts to facilitate Trump.
And once again, it was another complete lie. But the lie proved useful to Joe Biden in the debates and the campaign. And he won the election.
Then, without learning anything and without forgetting anything, we focused on the 2023-2024 campaign.
This time their subsequent extralegal activities had a dual nature.
First, they tried unsuccessfully to remove Trump from the ballot in about 15 states.
Two courts — local, state and federal — have launched a legal battle aimed at convicting and imprisoning candidate Trump, or at least bankrupting him and removing him from the campaign.
Three district attorneys and a state attorney campaigned to bring charges against Trump that have never been brought against a presidential candidate before, and rarely against anyone else.
Georgia’s top prosecutor, Fani Willis, met secretly with Biden’s White House lawyer.
Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan team has hired the third-most senior federal prosecutor in Biden’s Justice Department.
The court found that special prosecutor Jack Smith was appointed unlawfully and most of his case was dismissed.
On July 14, a shooter nearly killed candidate Trump by slitting his ear with a rifle shot from a rooftop just 130 yards away — while law enforcement officers in the same building went unnoticed.
Before the shooting, Joe Biden boasted to donors that “it’s time to put Trump right in the middle of the bullseye.”
Biden has said almost constantly that a Trump victory would mean the end of democracy, a theme that the left has stoked by comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler ad nauseam.
Yet here we are in mid-July 2024, and Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, is alive and leading incumbent President Biden — either because of or despite the crude attempts to destroy him.
After nearly a decade of utter madness, can we finally tell the FBI, Justice Department, and CIA to stay out of our elections?
Can the bankrupt media stop fanning hysteria over an alleged Nazi-style takeover?
Can the left stop relying on exploited British spies, corrupt former intelligence agents and groups of partisan clown prosecutors?
Why not let people choose their own president?
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness and a Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is an American military historian, columnist, former professor of classics, and scholar of old warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004.
Photo “Polling Station” by Phil Roeder CC BY 2.0.
