Freedom

By Victor Davis Hanson OPINION

The 2023-2024 campaign season is not just the strangest on record, it’s also arguably the most anti-democratic.

Ostensibly, the Democratic Party has claimed over the last decade that former President Donald Trump posed a continued and existential threat to the republic.

That allegation subsequently justified a variety of anti-democratic means to neuter his first two presidential candidacies, his presidency and now his third and final run for the White House.

A near decade ago, we witnessed the 2015-2016 Hillary Clinton/Democratic National Committee/FBI-assisted effort to plant the false accusation of Trump-Russian collusion to warp the 2016 election.

That gambit centered around the fraudulent Steele dossier and nearly fatally crippled the Trump 2016 campaign. That hoax would later sidetrack 22 months of his presidency before being proven a fantasy.

On the eve of the 2020 election, the left next birthed the Russian laptop disinformation campaign. That hoax also warped a presidential debate with false charges that Hunter Biden’s own incriminating laptop was once again the work of Russians seeking to conspire with Trump.

Those unusual efforts continued during the Biden administration.

For the first time in election history, the allies of one campaign sought to persuade some 16 states to try to remove a major party’s likely nominee from their primary and general election ballots.

The plan was to smother a Trump third presidential bid in its infancy, and thus once again not allow the people to accept or reject his candidacy.

Nearly simultaneously, four federal, state and local prosecutors filed dozens of felony charges against Trump.

They all shared some strange similarities.

These indictments would likely not have been filed, had Trump not run for office. Nor would any of them have proceeded had Trump not been a controversial conservative Republican seeking reelection.

Almost all the charges had not been filed against any other prior candidate and rarely a private citizen.

Some of them could just as easily have been lodged against President Joe Biden and his son.

Some indictments and convictions may still achieve their objectives of bankrupting, jailing or keeping Trump inert during the final weeks of the campaign.

One of the Georgia prosecutors had undisclosed meetings with the Biden White House counsel.

Biden himself, on the eve of the federal prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment, all but declared his campaign rival Trump guilty.

Biden’s own chief of the White House had also met privately and secretly with a Smith aide.

In an unprecedented fashion, Smith rushed his prosecution to ensure it synchronized with the 2024 campaign.

Similar federal charges could just as easily have led to the indictment of Biden — if the special counsel in that case had not claimed that he could not convince a jury to convict a culpable but cognitively challenged Biden.

Another Biden prosecutor mysteriously left his top position at the Justice Department to join the Alvin Bragg Manhattan prosecutorial staff.

Nonetheless, Trump had survived collusion, disinformation, de-balloting, lawfare and a subsequent assassination attempt to surge far ahead of Biden in the June presidential polls.

Biden’s poll collapse prompted Democratic donors and high-ranking politicos to force a stress-test presidential debate before either candidate was even nominated at their respective conventions.

When Biden imploded in the debate, a supposedly once-fit president was suddenly declared impaired. And a previously uninspiring Vice President Kamala Harris was abruptly transmogrified into a superb replacement candidate.

Biden was forced to resign his candidacy to save his last five months in office from a Democrat-threatened removal via the 25th Amendment.

The primary votes of nearly 15 million voters were abruptly nullified.

Harris, who had neither won a primary nor a single delegate through an election, was suddenly coronated as the new Biden-replacement candidate — and without an open convention contest or vote.

The donor-politico class further decided that, like a challenged Biden in 2024, Harris could not be allowed to hold press conferences. She would do few if any live interviews, unscripted town halls or any other venue given fears her visible liabilities might endanger her candidacy.

So, the Party that had proclaimed democracy dies in darkness now favors the shadows as the preferable means to obtain and retain power — whether by ignoring primary voters, open conventions or transparent venues with the voters.

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Add up the last decade’s purchased collusion caper, unprecedented two impeachments, orchestrated disinformation hoax, efforts to de-ballot Trump, warping of the legal system to jail him and destroy his candidacy, forced removal of an unpopular but unwilling President Biden from the Democrat ticket, virtual anointing of Harris by fiat in his place and the current collusion with a compliant media to avoid public scrutiny and cross-examination of Harris.

And the conclusion?

Have those who lectured us about democracy in danger now decided to save it by destroying it?