From even before Trump took office, Republicans watched as Democrats engaged in a nonstop effort to undermine and destroy him. First, they falsely accused him of conspiring with Russian President Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election, paralyzing our country for nearly two years with an investigation into a conspiracy theory. Then came Trump’s first impeachment, launched after a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which most Americans believed was deplorable but not impeachable. Then came his second impeachment on the charge of inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, riot; the politicized hush-money indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg; a federal indictment over mishandling classified information (after Hillary Clinton was not indicted over her mishandling of classified information); a federal indictment around Jan. 6 and the most recent indictment in Georgia on charges of attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And now some Democrats are seriously talking about using the 14th Amendment to kick Trump off the ballot — effectively asking secretaries of state to do what Trump shamefully asked Vice President Mike Pence to do and deny the American people their votes.
As I have repeatedly made clear, Trump has given Democrats every pretext to go after him. But this has been a sustained and unprecedented onslaught against the man Americans legitimately elected to the presidency in 2016.
At the same time, Republicans have watched as Democrats abused our institutions to protect the Bidens. First came the apparent collusion between the FBI, the intelligence community, the Biden campaign and social media platforms to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and falsely discredit it as Russian disinformation. Then came the allegations by IRS whistleblowers that the Biden Justice Department repeatedly undermined their investigation into Hunter Biden. Then Attorney General Merrick Garland named David Weiss special counsel in the Hunter Biden investigation — although Weiss had already mismanaged the ongoing probe, including by offering Biden a sweetheart plea deal so bad that it fell apart after a federal judge questioned its terms. Republicans on Capitol Hill see Garland’s move as nothing more than an effort to stymie congressional investigators — thus necessitating this impeachment inquiry to give Congress the expanded subpoena power it needs to get to the bottom of the Biden family’s alleged corruption.
This should come as a surprise to no one; it was only a matter of time before Republicans used the same tools and followed precedents set by Democrats to go after Biden.
The first 222 years of U.S. history saw just two presidential impeachments. We could be on a path toward the third in four years. And it won’t end there. There will be enormous pressure on the next Republican president to use the justice system against Democrats the same way Democrats have weaponized it against Republicans. If this goes on, it won’t be long before we truly become a banana republic where each sitting president’s administration indicts his or her predecessor.
Meanwhile, public trust in the integrity of our key institutions has effectively collapsed in recent years. The irony is: The left justifies its campaign against Trump by citing the threat he poses to our democratic institutions. Yet their efforts to stop him have done as much damage to those institutions as he has.
This is precisely why Danielle Pletka and I called on President Biden to pardon Trump when he was indicted in the classified documents case — not because Trump didn’t do anything wrong, but because of the dangers his prosecution poses to our democracy. Newton’s Third Law — that for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction — applies to politics as well. The more Democrats use extra-democratic means to try to stop Trump from retaking the presidency, the more likely it becomes that Republicans will renominate him and that he will return to the Oval Office.
So, brace yourself, folks. Because this impeachment inquiry is only the beginning, and the blowback might have only just begun.
