When Donald Trump appeared to be gaining ground in the 2016 Republican primaries, Democrats concluded that they couldn’t expect Americans to choose “the right thing” while waiting for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
What followed was eight years of extrajudicial efforts to neutralize Donald Trump, candidate, president, former president and candidate again.
All these relentless efforts were justified as “saving democracy” – even as they nearly destroyed it.
In 2015 and 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign spread the lie that discredited former British spy Christopher Steele had identified Trump as a real Russian agent.
Hillary did not disclose that she paid checks to Steele. The checks were hidden in three paid content packages. The FBI, led by Director James Comey, also hired this conman.
However, very little of his “Steele Dossier” was true.
The FBI tampered with evidence presented to the FISA court, and Comey leaked classified documents to the press about private conversations with President Trump.
Comey’s successor as acting FBI director, Andrew McCabe, lied repeatedly to federal investigators.
Former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper both repeatedly lied to the public about President Trump effectively working with Russia.
The result? Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 but won the electoral vote.
Next, celebrities and well-funded liberals launched a media campaign to convince electors to be “faithless.” Left-wing elites implored electors to abandon their constitutional duty and instead hand the election over to Hillary Clinton.
When Trump was elected, “Russia collusion” hysterics were stoked again.
Special counsel Robert Mueller spent 22 months of Trump’s term in office, and his investigative team constantly fed Trump false information about a “coming wall.”
Nearly two years later, special counsel Mueller announced he found no evidence that Trump sought to collude with Russia.
Next came President Trump’s first impeachment, shortly after his defeat in the House of Representatives in 2018.
Trump allegedly tried to use the delay in foreign aid to force Ukraine into investigating corrupt Hunter Biden.
Trump was impeached on a purely partisan vote.
But then no one denied that drug addict Hunter Biden actually made his fortune in Ukraine, or that Joe Biden, while vice president, fired the Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating his son’s misconduct, or that Trump released all of the military aid designated by Congress, including the offensive weapons that the Obama-Biden administration had denied to Ukraine.
Then, in 2020, when Hunter’s laptop was discovered abandoned in a repair shop and loaded with further evidence of Biden family wrongdoing, the left attacked again.
The company convened “51 former intelligence officials” on the eve of the vote to mislead Americans into thinking the laptop was likely fake — another hoax concocted by Russian disinformation experts to help Trump.
And that, too, was a complete lie. But that lie proved to be beneficial to Joe Biden in the debates and on the campaign trail. And he won the election.
Next, the Left, which learns nothing and forgets nothing, turned its attention to the 2023-2024 election campaign.
This time, their next extrajudicial effort was twofold.
First, there was the failed attempt to remove Trump from the ballot in about 15 states.
Second, local, state and federal courts have begun legal battles to convict and imprison candidate Trump, or at least bankrupt him and keep him off the campaign trail.
Three county and state prosecutors campaigned to indict Trump on charges never before brought against a presidential candidate and rarely brought against anyone else.
Georgia’s chief prosecutor, Fani Willis, met secretly with Biden’s advisers.
Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan team has hired the third-ranking federal prosecutor in the Biden Justice Department.
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith was found to have been illegally appointed by the court, and most of his cases were dismissed.
On July 13, a gunman nearly killed candidate Trump, firing a rifle at him from a rooftop just 140 yards away, slicing through his ear, without being noticed by police officers standing at the very bottom of the building.
Before the shooting, Joe Biden boasted to donors that “it’s time to target Trump.”
Biden has almost continuously charged that Trump’s victory would mean the end of democracy, a theme that the left has fueled by tirelessly likening Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Yet here we are, in mid-July 2024, and Republican nominee Trump is alive and leading incumbent Biden, thanks to or despite the crude attempts to destroy him.
After almost a decade of insanity, can we finally order the FBI, Department of Justice and CIA to step aside from the election?
Will the bankrupt media ever stop stoking hysteria about a Nazi-like takeover?
Can the left stop relying on fallen British spies, corrupt ex-intelligence officers and a team of buffoonish partisan prosecutors?
Why not let the people choose their own president instead?
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of World War II: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, published by Basic Books. He can be contacted at authorvdh@gmail.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
