Ever since he first won the White House in 2016, Donald Trump has been smeared as a “threat to democracy” by left-wing elites, from the political class to media propagandists to professional agitators and activists. First, of course, there was the “Russian collusion” hoax. Then-President Barack Obama and his national security officers were joined by congressional Democrats and mainstream media outlets in claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally manipulated the 2016 presidential election results in order to secure a Trump victory. The theory was frequently flanked by vulgar and implausible claims that the Russians held sway over the then-president-elect by means of blackmail.

The next four years — almost the entirety of Trump’s first term, in fact — were plagued by claims of “Russian collusion.” Then-FBI Director James Comey spent months running sensationalist investigations into links between Trump campaign and administration officials and Russia. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) led congressional Democrats in initiating impeachment proceedings against Trump based on the “Russian collusion” claims. Men like retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, Trump’s pick for national security advisor, and foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos were targeted by Comey for entrapment.

After Trump fired Comey, former FBI director and then-special counsel Robert Mueller launched an investigation into ties between Trump and Russia, a 22-month-long ordeal that ultimately found no evidence of “collusion,” “conspiracy,” or “coordination” between Trump and Russia, although Mueller alleged potential obstruction of justice despite the absence of any underlying crime.

The “Russian collusion” hoax hamstringed Trump’s first presidency, forcing the president and his deputies — such as Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr and White House Counsel Don McGahn — to parry a barrage of subpoenas issued by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives and waste time, energy, and resources responding to baseless allegations of “Russian collusion” instead of, you know, running the country. One of the most damning aspects of the affair, however, was erroneously establishing as fact for at least a portion of the American public the allegation that Trump was likely corrupt, even though no one could prove it.

In 2019, the Democrat-controlled House, run by then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), capitalized on the presumption of corruption and filed articles of impeachment against Trump, charging the president with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Once again, the claim was rooted in the notion that Trump was somehow illegally manipulating American democracy. This time, however, the narrative hinged on Ukraine, not Russia, although the latter did make an appearance.

According to congressional Democrats, Trump had tried to bully Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing an investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of Trump’s 2020 opponent Joe Biden, by denying military aid to Ukraine. The term “quid pro quo” will immediately spring to mind for those who followed the impeachment proceedings at the time. Allegedly, Trump withheld a $400 million aid package intended for Ukraine, later releasing it on (again, allegedly) the condition that Zelensky publicly investigate the Bidens for corruption linked to Hunter Biden’s involvement with Ukraine-based energy company Burisma. According to then-acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, however, Trump’s decision to withhold the aid package was based on the country’s refusal to cooperate with a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into Ukraine for interfering in the 2016 election and subsequently framing Russia.

Although Trump was acquitted by the Republican-held Senate in early 2020, another impeachment quickly followed. On January 13, 2021, just one week before his first term expired, the House once again voted to impeach Trump, this time alleging that he had intentionally incited an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 in an effort to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The decision to continue with the impeachment process even after Trump (willingly and peacefully, by the way) left the White House was an obvious effort to bar the 45th president from ever returning.

The next four years saw such efforts continue and accelerate. Citing the “insurrection” on January 6, Democrats moved to keep Trump off the ballot in multiple states, nearly succeeding in Colorado. While running for reelection, Biden claimed that “the greatest threat Trump poses is to the democracy” and that “Donald Trump and his Maga Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy,” constantly referring to Trump as an “existential threat” to democracy. Other Democrats repeated the phrase ad nauseam. “Trump Is an Existential Threat To Our Democracy,” the Democratic National Committee (DNC) claimed. “Democracy is at stake this November, and if Donald Trump retakes power the survival of our democracy will be at risk.” Even after Trump was shot in the side of the head at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Democrats continued labeling Trump a “threat to democracy.”

In the parlance of children, accusations — “You’re a scaredy cat,” “You’re a loser,” “You’re a slow-poke” — may be met with the defense, “No I’m not, you are!” While such arguments don’t hold up in American courts of law, Democrats have nevertheless seemingly adopted the tactic. While whining for roughly a decade about Trump posing an “existential threat” to democracy, Democrats have been actively undermining and subverting the very democracy they claim to cherish.

Trump’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard released a report last week revealing that the “Russian collusion” hoax was actually engineered and orchestrated by Obama and his intelligence agency officials, including then-DNI James Clapper, Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, Secretary of State John Kerry, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and others. After months of intelligence concluding that Russia had neither the means nor the motivation to interfere in the 2016 presidential election beyond online propaganda campaigns and possibly leaking information damaging to either campaign, the Obama administration buried its prior intelligence reports and began fabricating new “intelligence” to leak to the press. In other words, when the American people elected Trump as president, Obama and his intelligence cabal conspired to negate the votes of nearly 63 million Americans.

Nor was that the last time that Democrats attempted to stifle the will of the American people. Given that the “Russian collusion” hoax was nothing more than a hoax, subsequent Democrat-led efforts to hamper the first Trump administration and remove the president on the basis of falsified “Russian collusion” were themselves attempts to subvert and even reverse American democracy. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, unelected, Democrat-appointed bureaucrats and career agency officials aggressively censored Americans and even suppressed legitimate news stories in an effort to defeat Trump and install Biden in the White House.

Democrats funded months of lawsuits and indictments against Trump on (no pun intended, it’s unfortunately unavoidable) trumped-up charges, resulting in a felony conviction against a former president and presidential candidate. Democrat-appointed prosecutors even publicized unsubstantiated allegations against Trump just a month before the 2024 election. As soon as Trump won in November, Democrats promptly dropped the prosecutions, implicitly admitting that the investigations against the 45th and 47th president were nothing more than a witch hunt for the sake of theatrics and political manipulation.

When it became obvious in 2024 that Biden’s age and cognitive decline would more than likely preclude him from running against Trump again, Democrats engineered a coup against the man who had dominated Democratic primaries and forced him to suspend his campaign. Instead of allowing Democrat voters or even Democratic National Convention delegates to choose their presidential nominee, party elites installed then-Vice President Kamala Harris without her ever even having won a primary.

As if none of that were bad enough, investigations are now returning evidence suggesting that Biden may not have even been running the country while in the White House. Republicans are currently probing the Biden administration’s frequent use of autopen technology to determine whether the then-president was aware of orders being issued in his name or if a collection of unelected Democratic Party elites — cabinet secretaries, advisors, aides, staffers, and Biden family members — were taking advantage of Biden’s cognitive decline to covertly run the White House without his knowledge.

It turns out that the political party obsessed with talking about the subversion, manipulation, and corruption of America’s democratic republic has been actively subverting, manipulating, and corrupting America’s democratic republic. While it is undoubtedly a positive development that this appallingly deceptive conduct is now coming to light, the crisis is one of not just transparency and accountability — which are sorely needed in the U.S. government today — but of virtue.

Too many of those with their fingers on the levers of power in America’s institutions are quite simply lacking in virtue and integrity. Those who are willing to deceive the American public on a mass scale, fabricate pseudo-geopolitical crises, target and dehumanize entire swaths of the American people, and ruthlessly prosecute political opponents on the most dishonest of claims have clearly abandoned both virtue and integrity in the mad, starving search for power. For some, this power is both a means and end in itself, something to be used to accumulate more power, or to hold onto what power one has already hoarded. For others, power is simply a means to an end. While this approach is not in itself evil, it becomes both evil and exceedingly dangerous when it is uncoupled from both virtue and integrity.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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