President Joe Biden’s Jan. 5 address at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, heralded the Democrats’ much-predicted decision to switch the focus of the president’s reelection campaign from “Bidenomics” to the one theme that has been a winner for them in the last two years. Democrats helped stave off disaster in the 2022 midterms (they lost the House but held the Senate) by declaring that the only way to save American “democracy” was to defeat former President Donald Trump and Republicans.
The speech was a predictable example of Biden’s hyperbole and bluster. He waved the proverbial “bloody shirt” of Jan. 6, 2021, and invoked the specter of a president and party that supported a so-called insurrection. He linked Trump not just to the Capitol rioters but to Russian President Vladimir Putin (a not-so-subtle invocation of the Russian-collusion conspiracy theory) and also to King George III. And he dropped George Washington’s name so often it seemed as if Biden was saying the choice was not so much between himself and Trump but between the 45th president and the first.
But one didn’t have to read between the lines of Biden’s speech to understand that — whatever one might think of Trump’s own brand of bluster and hyperbole — much of this argument was not just hypocritical but pure projection. As has been apparent ever since Democrats immediately began rebranding the Capitol riot as an “insurrection,” this is all a cover for their plans to ensure they can’t lose the 2024 election. It is also laying the groundwork for an insurrection — which they’d depict as a defense of “democracy” rather than an example of Jan. 6-like “treason” — if they do lose.
This goes beyond the dishonest manner in which former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s show-trial Jan. 6 Committee considered all efforts to question the 2020 presidential election results — something both parties always did when the results were close — as an extension of the actions of the mob that broke into the Capitol. That made most Republicans into insurrectionists. Even those who wanted to move on when Trump continued protesting the 2020 results understood that the normal election-integrity guardrails had been discarded amid the Covid drama of that year and that the national security establishment, the media, and the internet oligarchs who control the virtual public square had silenced news about Biden family corruption that might have affected the outcome.
They also knew that claiming that an event that was a disgrace — but hardly more so than many even more violent and deadly “mostly peaceful” riots during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020 — was not an organized coup d’état attempt (a better description of the Russia-collusion hoax), let alone the moral equivalent of the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter.
The End of Democracy
The first anniversary of Jan. 6 in 2022 was marked by a torrent of punditry already looking ahead to the 2024 elections and fanciful predictions of Republican plots to steal it. A lot of that was focused on false arguments about the election-integrity laws put in place in some red states to ensure that the 2022 midterms would be conducted with the safeguards that were discarded in 2020. But as the 2024 election drew closer, the Democrats and their media cheering section switched tactics and instead concentrated on smearing Trump and his voters as incipient totalitarians who will end democracy if they win.
Part of this is mere distortion, as with their claims that the conservative Project 2025 is an authoritarian plot. The project is a much-needed effort to ensure that Republicans are ready to govern next year — as they were not in 2017 when the traditional GOP governing class refused to serve under Trump or to help him implement the changes his supporters had voted for. It’s also aimed at allowing a new GOP administration to be prepared to thwart the Democrat-dominated permanent federal bureaucracy’s attempts to prevent it from governing, as it largely did from 2017 to 2020.
But most of the talk about authoritarianism is a rehashing of Trump’s most outrageous quotes about his political foes into a handbook for authoritarian rule. Though none of those making such arguments can explain why Trump — who had trouble getting the government to do anything he wanted when he was in the White House — failed to actually govern like an authoritarian.
Democrats Trample the Constitution
Also missing from this discussion are the pieces of the puzzle that show us which party intends to trample the Constitution: That is Biden’s own voluminous record of authoritarianism in office as well as the signals coming from the corporate media that they intend to double down on their efforts to defeat Trump.
Since taking office, Biden has colluded with Big Tech to silence dissent against his policies and made moves to create his own Orwellian “Truth Ministry,” a more serious blow to self-government than anything Trump ever talked of doing, let alone actually did.
Biden also demonstrated a willingness to use his power to undermine the rule of law by effectively eliminating border security, bringing an invasion of several million illegal immigrants who either rushed the border or made bogus asylum claims.
He’s shown, as with his implementing a student loan forgiveness plan without the benefit of law, that he has no scruples about trashing the separation of powers and the Constitution while grabbing power. Indeed, that’s something that neither Trump nor George III ever did (Andrew Roberts’ biography teaches us that George III actually respected the British Constitution even if he was blind to the sensibilities of his American subjects).
More than that, Biden has, to the cheers of his base, presided over efforts to prosecute and jail his leading political opponent on a raft of flimsy and bogus charges. On top of that, the Democrats are now making active efforts — with Colorado and Maine in the lead — to take Trump entirely off the ballot, even though he is currently the choice of more than 60 percent of Republican voters and leading Biden head-to-head and in matchups that include third-party candidates.
On top of that, the Democrat Party fixed its presidential primaries in such a way as to ensure no opposition to Biden would be allowed.
Cheating in elections is as old as the republic itself, and we’ve had plenty of administrations that bent the rules to their advantage. But the targeting of Trump alone is arguably the most blatant effort to undermine self-government and steal an election in American political history.
Expect Media Bias and Mobs
If that weren’t enough, it’s an open secret that the corporate media plan to discard even the most flimsy attempts to feign objectivity in election coverage, as shown in recent columns from chattering class establishmentarians such as Margaret Sullivan and Maureen Dowd. Since Trump is now branded as anti-democratic, the claim is that Democrats will be right to do anything, no matter how illegal, to defeat him. And their accomplice media are prepared to declare all such efforts perfectly democratic no matter how despotic they actually are.
If Trump wins despite all of this, it’s not unreasonable to expect Democrats, along with their establishment and administrative-state minions, to do exactly what they claimed Trump plotted to do in 2020 by denying an election and illegally attempting to change the results. Such efforts will likely be backed up by the corporate media and the same mobs who poured into the streets of America’s cities in the summer of 2020. That sounds a lot more like an insurrection than anything attempted by the rioters of Jan. 6.
Biden is, however, right about one thing. There is a party that is a threat to democracy, and it will be fighting for power in November. But its leader is Joe Biden, not Donald Trump.