After an election, we make nice. The loser congratulates the victor; everybody shakes hands and promises a smooth transition of power. Spicy campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, such courtesies in service to the god of Stability are made possible by the underlying assumption that, while competing candidates and parties offer different ideas of how to achieve a better America, that’s the goal we all want because we all supposedly have similar values.
Conveying a sense of continuity was no doubt paramount on President Biden’s mind when he delivered his post-election invitation to President-Elect Trump to visit the White House. There, the two men exchanged an easy repartee before an Oval Office fire–a tradition Trump did not deign to offer the victorious Biden before slinking off to Mar-e-Lago in mid-January of 2021. Restoring normalcy, with the corollary that Jan. 6th was anomalous, is also why Biden as well as Vice President Kamala Harris will attend Trump’s inaugural ceremony.
Understandable, laudable desires by establishmentarians. Following this particular election, in which Democrats amped up the existential-threat-to-democracy histrionics to volume 11, however, Trump’s erstwhile opponents look like the boy who cried biggest-biteyest-rabid wolf ever.
What a lupine! Biden and then Harris, her surrogates and the liberal press called Trump a fascist, a wannabe dictator and an authoritarian. They warned that, if he won, there might never again be another election. They said he’d send his enemies to camps. The choice on the ballot, they said, came down to Harris or tyranny. Even if he lost, liberals worried, Trump might launch a violent coup.
Now Hitler Junior has won. Yet Democrats are playing it like they never said any of that, as though The Donald would never harm a fly.
If Little Adolf is planning to kill Anne Frank all over again, if he’s going to tear down Old Glory and run the swastika flag up the pole and force us all to salute, why are you Vichy Democrats inviting him over for tea? Now that the ravening wolf is chomping at the door, why is the president who called Trump’s supporters “garbage” and accused Trump of speaking “Hitler’s language” pledging to do “everything we can to make sure you’re accommodated?”
When it’s 1933 all over again, does it not follow that morality and historical precedent require you to launch a fierce proto-AntiFa Resistance, to stop the son-of-a-bitch by any means necessary—even by use of force?
If Trump is a fascist—like you said over and over—why are you attending his swearing-in? If you believe he’s plotting to suspend the Constitution and jail his enemies of which you are now one, why are you exchanging transition team liaisons rather than flooring it up I-87 to Canada?
The uncomfortable logical conclusion is that Democrats are liars.
What kind of liar exactly, we don’t know.
When Harris called Trump a fascist, she didn’t believe it. Not really. That, or she did believe it and she doesn’t mind enabling and validating a fascist regime or living under one. One of these things has to be true.
Bluster is a normal part of campaigning. As long as a politician’s slings and arrows against a rival don’t exceed exaggeration into rank hysteria, voters can move on after the election. Republicans who voted for Mitt Romney were disappointed that he lost, but his concession went down easily because he never told his supporters that Obama was dangerous. Democrats didn’t much care for George W. Bush but they weren’t afraid of him. As Trump said at the White House this week: “Politics is tough, and it’s, in many cases, not a very nice world but it is a nice world today.” Implication: nothing personal, it’s just business. As on the WWE, no actual humans were harmed in this partisan cage match.
This year, however, the fight was personal. Leaders of both parties convinced their partisans that the other party was evil, depressed Democrats are running to their psychiatrists in droves, and LGBTQ+ crisis hotlines are jammed. There were even (false) reports of post-Trump-victory suicides.
Pumping up the political drama this far has consequences. One underappreciated side effect of 2024 is that voters of the future will be less likely to listen the next time they’re warned that a candidate represents a grave threat to their freedoms. That’s a problem. Because, someday–that day may be today, Trump may be that menace, we don’t know yet–there will be such a dangerous figure. But there will no way to sound the alarm loudly enough to prompt and organize a defense.
And Democrats have been caught in their own Big Lie. After years of misleading us about Biden’s mental fitness and telling us Trump would be a dictator, they turn around and normalize him. How can they just toss him the keys to the White House on their way out the door? Were they full of crap about the Great Orange Threat? Or are they stupid?
Give it to Trump: Reprehensible as it was, his behavior and messaging after losing to Biden in 2020 were consistent with what he conveyed before the election. If Biden won, Trump said throughout the campaign, it would mean Democrats had cheated. After Biden won, Trump refused to concede or cooperate with a transition effort and provoked the January 6th riot to try to overturn the result. It was gross and destabilizing and antidemocratic—but he remained on message.
Trump has a strong immoral center.
Stability and continuity are important. But Democrats don’t seem to have considered that a political system is like Jenga. Move to shore up one piece and you risk dislodging another upon which everything else rests, causing the whole thing to collapse. By choosing calm and continuity, Democrats have sacrificed credibility.
“Trump Is a Dictator” is the new WMDs. Just as Bush never recovered from failing to find proscribed weapons in Iraq, this year’s Democrats will never be forgiven for crying “Nazi wolf!” unless one actually materializes. You can’t lay on the doomsday rhetoric as thickly as Democrats have done over the past year without it being followed either by one of two things: an actual shift to authoritarianism, or a decision by many people that your party ought no longer to be taken seriously.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
