What continues to fascinate me about Donald Trump’s presidency is the fact that Democrats, out of a loathing for the man that exceeds all boundaries of rationality, have managed to exceed all of his supposedly norm-destroying transgressions.
This was already so when Hillary Clinton refused to accept the result of the 2016 election and called Trump an “illegitimate president.” Recall that, before the election, it was Clinton herself who had feigned outrage over Trump’s refusal during the campaign to commit to accepting that election’s results. Once she had lost, the shoe was on the other foot, wasn’t it?
In the time since, Democrats have threatened to pack the Supreme Court — a much more brazen power grab than anything Trump tried while in office. They have also moved to abolish the Senate filibuster to ram through extremist legislation with the slimmest majority. This is something Trump had also demanded of his Republican allies (to the feigned outrage of Democrats) when his party held a Senate majority. Fortunately, cooler Republican heads prevailed.
Now, we have news that President Joe Biden was making noises about prosecuting the man he defeated in 2020 as recently as “late last year.” The offense for which Trump is to be prosecuted appears to be the bog-standard political rhetoric that preceded the storming of the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. Trump told supporters:
This is the sort of thing politicians say all the time. They even call on supporters to “storm the Capitol” — this was true long before Trump. And don’t forget, most of the protesters that day did not trespass in the Capitol or try to interfere with Congress’s operations.
Now comes the news that Biden wants to prosecute Trump for something that pedestrian. This is something Democrats once freaked out over during Trump’s campaign when his supporters raised chants of “Lock her up!” in reference to Hillary Clinton. It was wrong then, and it’s still wrong now. To paraphrase Sen. Dick Durbin, this is how Nazi and Soviet leaders behave — it is not how democracies work.
Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin put their political opponents in prison. American presidents do not do that. This new report is evidence that Biden is a lot more dangerous than I ever believed before.
It’s all fun and games when your president suffers from a loss of cognitive abilities — it’s another story when he starts threatening to criminalize the political opposition.
