by Victor Davis Hanson
The 2023-24 election campaign season is not only the strangest on record, it may also be the most anti-democratic.
For the past decade, the Democratic Party has argued that Donald Trump poses a constant and existential threat to the republic.
That accusation then became the justification for a series of anti-democratic measures designed to neutralize his first two presidential bids, his presidency, and now his third and final run for the White House.
Almost a decade ago, we witnessed Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and the FBI in 2015-2016 working to spread the false accusation that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
The gambit centered around the fraudulent Steele dossier and nearly fatally crippled Trump’s 2016 campaign. The joke later distracted from the 22 months of his presidency before it was proven to be a fantasy.
On the eve of the 2020 election, the left launched a Russian laptop-based disinformation campaign.
This fraud also distorted the course of the presidential debate, as false accusations surfaced that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was once again the work of Russians seeking to collude with Trump.
These unusual actions continued under the Biden administration.
For the first time in election history, allies of a single campaign attempted to persuade 16 states to try to remove the likely major party candidate from the ballots in both the primary and general election.
The plan was to derail Trump’s third presidential campaign early on, thus once again making it impossible for people to accept or reject his candidacy.
Almost simultaneously, four federal, state and local prosecutors brought dozens of criminal charges against Trump.
They all had some strange similarities.
These indictments likely would not have been filed had Trump not run for office. And none of them would have been filed had Trump not been a controversial conservative Republican running for reelection.
Almost all of the charges were not brought against any other prior candidate, and rarely against an individual.
Some of them could just as easily have been directed against Joe Biden and his son.
Some indictments and convictions could still achieve their intended goal of bankrupting Trump, imprisoning him or keeping him inactive in the final weeks of the campaign.
A Georgia prosecutor held undisclosed meetings with Biden’s White House lawyer.
President Biden himself, on the eve of federal prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment, virtually found his Trump campaign rival guilty.
Biden’s White House secretary also met privately and secretly with Smith.
Smith has accelerated the process at an unprecedented rate to align with the 2024 campaign.
Similar federal charges could well lead to the impeachment of President Joe Biden — if the special prosecutor in the case had not argued that he could not persuade a jury to convict the guilty but mentally challenged Biden.
Biden’s next prosecutor has mysteriously resigned from his top Justice Department job to join Alvin Bragg’s prosecution team in Manhattan.
Still, Trump survived collusion, disinformation, an election overturn, a legal fight and a subsequent assassination attempt to secure a significant lead over Biden in June’s presidential election.
The slump in the polls prompted Democratic donors and high-ranking politicians to force a presidential debate as an endurance test before either candidate was nominated at their conventions.
When Biden faltered in the debate, a once-capable president was suddenly seen as retarded. And previously uninspiring Vice President Kamala Harris was suddenly transformed into the perfect replacement candidate.
Biden was forced to drop out of the race to save his final five months in office from the threat of removal from office by a Democrat under the 25th Amendment.
The votes of nearly 15 million voters in the primary election were suddenly invalidated.
Harris, who neither won a primary nor a single delegate in the election, was suddenly crowned the fresh candidate to replace Biden — and without an open convention contest or a vote.
The political donor class has also ruled that, like Biden in 2024, Harris cannot be allowed to hold news conferences. She would give few, if any, live interviews, unscripted town halls or other events, given concerns that her apparent commitments could jeopardize her candidacy.
The party that proclaimed democracy is dying in darkness, now choosing shadows as a better way to gain and maintain power — whether through ignoring voters in primaries, open conventions, or lucid meetings with voters.
Add to that the bought-in collusion of the past decade, two unprecedented impeachments, a planned disinformation scam, attempts to remove Trump from the ticket, perverting the legal system to imprison him and destroy his candidacy, the forced removal of the unpopular but reluctant President Biden from the Democratic ticket, the virtual anointing of Harris in his place by executive order, and the current collusion with a compliant media to avoid public scrutiny and cross-examination of Harris.
And the conclusion?
Have those who taught us about the dangers of democracy now decided to save it by destroying it?
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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 antique warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004.
Photo “United States Capitol Building” by AnthonyTPope.CC BY-SA 4.0.
