by Victor Davis Hanson
When Donald Trump seemed to have a lock on the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that the people could not be counted on to do the “right thing” of electing the Democratic candidate in waiting Hillary Clinton.
What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to neuter candidate, then President, then ex-President, and then candidate again, Donald Trump.
The nonstop efforts were all justified as “saving democracy”—albeit by nearly destroying it.
In 2015-2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fueled the lie that discredited ex-British spy Christopher Steele had discovered Donald Trump to be a veritable Russian agent.
Hillary did not disclose that she had paid Steele—with checks hidden through three paywalls. The FBI, under Director James Comey, also hired the fraudster.
Yet almost nothing in his “Steele dossier” was true.
The FBI doctored evidence submitted to a FISA court. Comey leaked to the press confidential documents about his private conversations with President Trump.
Comey’s successor, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, lied on numerous occasions to federal investigators.
Both former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper repeatedly lied to the nation, saying that Trump was de facto working with the Russians.
The result? Trump lost the 2016 popular vote but still won the Electoral College.
Next, celebrities and well-funded liberals waged a media campaign to convince the electors to become “faithless.” Left-wing elites begged them to renounce their constitutional duties and instead throw the election to Hillary Clinton.
Once Trump was elected, “Russian collusion” was fired up again in hysterical fashion.
A special counsel, Robert Mueller, consumed 22 months of the Trump presidency. His investigation team constantly leaked falsehoods about the “walls closing in on” Trump.
After nearly two years, Mueller announced there was no evidence of a Trump effort to collude with Russia.
Next was the first impeachment of Trump—nearly the moment he lost the House in 2018.
Supposedly, Trump had leveraged Ukraine to investigate a corrupt Hunter Biden by delaying foreign aid.
Trump was impeached on a strictly partisan vote.
But later, no one denied that the drug-addled Hunter Biden had indeed gotten rich from Ukraine, or that Joe Biden had fired a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into his son’s misadventures while still vice president, or that Trump released all the military assistance designated by Congress, or that he included offensive weapons formerly denied Ukraine by the Obama-Biden administration.
Next, in 2020, when Hunter’s laptop turned up abandoned at a repair shop and full of incriminating evidence of more Biden family skullduggery, the left struck again.
It rounded up “51 former intelligence authorities” to mislead the American people on the eve of the vote that the laptop was likely a fake—once again cooked up by Russian disinformation experts to aid Trump.
And once more, that was another complete falsehood. But the lie proved useful to Joe Biden in the debates and campaign. And he won the election.
Next, the learn-nothing, forget-nothing left turned to the 2023-2024 campaign.
This time, their next extra-legal efforts were twofold.
One, they unsuccessfully sought to remove Trump from some 15 state ballots.
Two, local, state, and federal courts began to wage lawfare to convict and jail candidate Trump, or at least bankrupt him and keep him off the campaign trail.
Three county and state prosecutors campaigned on getting Trump on charges never filed before against a presidential candidate—and rarely against anyone else as well.
The Fani Willis Georgia lead prosecutor met secretly with the Biden White House counsel.
Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan team hired the third-ranking federal prosecutor in the Biden Justice Department.
Special counsel Jack Smith was found by a court to have been illegally appointed and much of his case was dismissed.
On July 14, a shooter nearly killed candidate Trump, nicking his ear after somehow firing a rifle from a rooftop a mere 140 yards away—while undetected by law enforcement inside the very same building below.
Prior to the shooting, Joe Biden had boasted to donors that “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
Biden had railed nearly nonstop that a Trump victory would spell the end of democracy—a theme the left had fueled by comparing ad nauseam Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Yet here we are in mid-July 2024 and Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, is alive and leads incumbent Biden—either because of, or despite, the crude efforts to destroy him.
After nearly a decade of utter madness, can we finally order the FBI, DOJ, and CIA to butt out of our elections?
Can a bankrupt media cease whipping up hysterias about a supposed Nazi-like takeover?
Can the left stop relying on washed-up British spies, corrupt ex-spooks, and teams of clownish partisan prosecutors?
Instead, why not, at last, just let the people choose their own president?
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004.
Photo “Voting Station” by Phil Roeder CC BY 2.0.
