Is Trump Really A Threat To American Democracy?

Following his train wreck of a debate with former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden sat for what was widely viewed as a “make-or-break” interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. The 22-minute exchange, recorded on Friday afternoon in Madison, Wisconsin, and aired that night, did not go well. Although it didn’t create quite the stir that his performance in Atlanta did, it still fell short of its goal, which was to restore voters’ confidence in Biden’s ability to lead the country for another four years. 

Knowing this, Democrats’ response to Biden’s failure has been to amp up their fearmongering about Trump. It is clear that, regardless of whether Biden decides to step aside for a more youthful candidate, the Democratic Party will continue running on the canard that Trump poses the greatest existential threat to America’s democracy. This accusation has become the party’s mantra and is spouted as if it’s a proven fact by liberal pundits and politicians in nearly every cable news segment and article written about the 2024 election. 

When called upon to explain precisely why or how Trump poses a threat to democracy, Democrats point to his efforts to contest the results of the 2020 election – which, last I heard, was a candidate’s right. It should be noted that although Trump and many of his supporters remain convinced to this day that Biden won the election by fraudulent means, Trump never threatened to remain in office beyond the end of his term and cooperated fully with the transition. 

The reality is that Trump served as president for four years and his record shows that, rather than undermining the democratic values envisioned by our Founders, he defended them. Rather than diminishing our freedoms, he upheld and even increased them.

For example, Trump rolled back the intrusive and expensive federal regulations on businesses put in place during the Obama administration and cut taxes on individuals and corporations, which led to an economic boom. 

He placed crippling sanctions on Iran which brought their economy to a standstill. The mullahs simply had no money to wage war. 

He drastically reduced the number of illegal immigrants flowing into the U.S. by ending his predecessor’s dangerous “catch and release” policy and by implementing his highly effective “Remain in Mexico” policy. Democrats called him a racist and a fascist for simply enforcing U.S. immigration laws.

Although I am only scratching the surface, suffice it to say that Trump put America first. 

As for the Democrats’ lies that Trump will jail his political opponents if he wins in November, he had the opportunity to pursue charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for perpetrating the Russian collusion hoax, the greatest fraud ever carried out against a U.S. presidential candidate. But he declined, acknowledging that such a move would be “very, very divisive for the country.”

Yet, despite the lack of evidence that Trump is a threat to our democracy, this talking point remains the centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s deliberate, coordinated propaganda campaign. The party hopes that if it is repeated enough times, voters will believe it. They also hope it will distract voters from noticing the gradual erosion of our civil liberties and the encroaching tyranny that has engulfed our once (relatively) free society over the past three and a half years. 

The truth is that the most serious threat to our democracy is the Democratic Party itself, whose clear abuses of power have brought the U.S. closer than ever before to socialist state status, which has always been their goal. You may recall that during a 2008 campaign rally, then-candidate Barack Obama told supporters, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” The crowd roared. 

Those weren’t mere words. The junior senator from Illinois was deadly serious. It began with a determined effort by then-President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, to fill the government and its agencies with as many liberals as they possibly could, politicizing them.

Since then, the party has grown to include the legacy media, Big Tech, and the vast majority of federal agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA. The corruption that began under Obama has deepened and accelerated to a dangerous extent in the Biden administration, which has run roughshod over the Constitution. 

The Biden administration’s most glaring abuse of power has been the use of lawfare to destroy Trump. Other examples include their determination to cancel student loan debt even though the Supreme Court struck down their student loan forgiveness program; the FBI’s targeting of parents who objected to the teaching of critical race theory; the firing of healthcare workers and first responders who rejected the COVID-19 vaccine; the denial of due process to Jan. 6 protesters; and its refusal to enforce immigration laws.  

This brings us back to where we are today. Biden is senile. The signs were there in 2020. But the recent debate made it clear that his condition has deteriorated significantly over the past four years. And yet the legacy media, the communication arm of the Democratic Party, have covered it up. Who is the real threat to “our democracy”?

The Left is correct that democracy is under attack, but they’re lying about its source. When Democrats try to convince voters that Trump is a threat to our democratic norms, remember that a more insidious enemy, one that masquerades as a political party, is leading an assault on America from within.

Elizabeth Stauffer is a Research Fellow at the Sixteenth Council