by Matthew Boose
Barring intervention from the justice system, Donald Trump will be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. His odds of defeating an abject, potato-brained failure like Joe Biden are looking better every day. Whether they admit it or not, the establishment is starting to dread the very real possibility of Trump returning to power through the normal operations of what we used to call democracy, or what’s left of it, anyway.
This is really all we need to know about the continued hysteria over January 6 and the government’s fishing expedition relating to some files Trump was keeping at Mar-a-Lago without permission from ideologically compromised librarians at the National Archives. The apparatchiks in the permanent administrative state see Trump not as a threat to democracy, as they claim, but as a threat to themselves and their power. While the bureaucrats have made significant inroads under the lawless Biden regime, they have not, at least not yet, been able to make Trump and the people he represents go away. This terrifies and angers them. As long as dissent is a possibility, they won’t be satisfied.
The regime mouthpiece, Washington Post, expressed the anxiety of the nomenklatura in a recent hand-wringing screed depicting the doomsday scenario of Trump’s restoration. What more could Trump possibly do, after winning an election he wasn’t supposed to win in 2016 and then almost stealing another with help from QAnon, to harm “Our Democracy™”? Well, he could install “loyalists” in the federal government (as opposed to the disloyal bureaucrats from his last administration who went on TV to testify against him in partisan show trials). He could “politicize the FBI” with “endless” investigations into his opponents. Just imagine! A president using the justice system as a political weapon? That would be shocking.
Trump might even use the military to maintain public order if “widespread street protests erupt against Trump and his policies, or if disputes over future elections turn violent,” [emphasis added]. As the good democracy defenders at the Post see it, Trump would be obligated to just let this hypothetical anti-Trump insurrection happen. Of course, this scenario pretty much already took place in the summer of 2020, when insubordinate generals overruled his desire to quell the nationwide anarchy that forced Trump to take shelter, as the media simultaneously mocked him and portrayed him as a scary authoritarian.
Let’s check in on how “democracy” is doing under Joe Biden. Let’s see: just a few weeks ago, Biden gave a nasty speech in which he declared that people who don’t vote for him are enemies of the state. The FBI is conducting SWAT raids against conservative protesters. Lest we forget, Biden came into power with the apparent aid of covert and overt suppression of true information about his family. Dare to acknowledge any of this, and you’ll be shouted down as an “election denier.”
Speaking of election denial, has anyone been held accountable for the Russian collusion myth that kneecapped Trump’s presidency and sent millions into a tailspin of terminal partisan derangement?
If Trump wins in 2024, it will be despite years of relentless efforts by his enemies to undermine democracy. His presidential campaign was spied on. He was booted from social media while still a sitting president. Now, the attorney general of Trump’s dubiously elected rival and successor is under mounting pressure to put Trump in a cell. This is necessary to save “democracy,” which apparently no longer has anything to do with letting the people choose their own leaders.
The growing clamor to charge Trump suggests the bureaucrats believe the struggle of the past six years is nearly decided, but they are right to fear if it is not. Trump has acquired the status of a heroic dissident to a large part of the country. Here is one advantage that Trump has over protégé Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: to quote a favorite song of his, Trump has taken the blows. He understands America is in a struggle for liberation against tyrants that goes beyond ordinary politics, a struggle which, for Trump, is personal.
Feckless nobodies like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) say Trump is “unelectable,” but this is not only incorrect, it shows a poverty of political vision. Far from being a threat to American democracy, Trump and his movement represent an unvanquished pocket of democratic resistance to the bureaucratic tyranny of globalism. If there is any hope for American democracy, it lies with Trump overcoming this administrative hydra and its chokehold on our constitutional government.
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Matthew Boose is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose.
