A leading commentator from the Hoover Institution, Peter Berkowitz, is warning America that those who are the most virulent in their attempts to keep President Donald Trump off the 2024 ballot – essentially they are trying to destroy him – are the ones helping in the “unraveling of the rule of law.”
Berkowitz, the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, was for several years the director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department.
He explains at Real Clear Wire that the campaign against allowing voters to have even the opportunity of voting for Trump is being ratcheted to extreme levels.
In fact, Democrats and their specially chosen prosecutors have assembled a list of cases against Trump, including by now dozens and dozens of charges, often on what critics of the prosecutors say simply are flimsy, or fabricated, claims.
One, for example, wants him jailed for his opinions and statements about the 2020 election, the election that was skewed by at least two undue influences. One was Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to hand out $400 million plus to officials who often used the money to recruit Democrat voters. The other was the FBI’s decision to interfere by telling publications to suppress accurate, and damaging, reporting about the Bidens. A polling later showed that likely made Biden the winner in that race.
Their key talking points have been that Trump is an “insurrectionist” because a few hundred people rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, after he told them to protest peacefully, and their wild claims that electing Trump would end democracy in the constitutional republic that is America.
The characterization of Trump as an extreme threat is the problem, he pointed out.
“To insist that Donald Trump’s return to the White House is bound to bring dictatorship to America encourages the use of all means necessary to thwart his bid for the presidency. Flight 93 Election anti-Trumpers thereby facilitate the unraveling of the rule of law that they seek to avert,” he explained.
The “Flight 93” reference comes from a book, he explained.
“On Sept. 5, 2016, The Claremont Review of Books’ website published ‘The Flight 93 Election’ under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus. The high-brow polemic went viral a few days later when Rush Limbaugh read it aloud on his radio show. Author Michael Anton – who served on President Trump’s National Security Council and is now a fellow at Hillsdale College and the Claremont Institute – analogized the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to the one faced by passengers on the last of the four doomed commercial aircraft that had been hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. If Flight 93 passengers did nothing, they faced certain death. If they charged the cockpit, they might still die, but they gave themselves a fighting chance to seize control of the plane,” he explained.
The analysis suggested Trump was articulating the correct positions on immigration, trade, war and more during that campaign.
While pointing that desperate times require desperate measures, Anton “did not call for lawlessness. But by maintaining that Clinton’s election would produce unmitigated catastrophe, he encouraged the notion that all bets were off if she prevailed at the ballot box,” Berkowitz wrote.
But now, he said, “Today’s anti-Trumpers go Anton one better. Whereas he warned of the danger of progressive dictatorship a mere two months before the 2016 election, anti-Trumpers have been sounding the alarm continuously against Trumpian tyranny since 2016 and have picked up the pace this cycle.”
He said at this point, “much of the elite media is marching in lockstep to alert the nation of its imminent peril. New York Times columnist Charles Blow argued in mid-December that the prospect of a Trump-led Republican Party taking power shows that ‘our democracy hangs by a thread.’ Talking heads on CNN and MSNBC have been affirming matter-of-factly that Trump will extinguish democracy.”
Ex-Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming who was fired by voters following her years-long war on Trump, claimed that America, because it does not follow her anti-Trump agenda, is “sleepwalking into dictatorship.”
Other leftists have made similar suggestions, including Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan, who claimed, “Once elected … Trump will prove unstoppable,” Berkowitz explained.
Kagan’s claims, Berkowitz noted, include that the DOJ would prosecute “the honorable and innocent,” Trump would defy the Supreme Court and a GOP Congress would do nothing.
Kagan lamented that Americans are approaching the 2024 election is if it was an ordinary election, not a “looming disaster.”
Berkowitz pointed out that actually, “history provides scarce evidence of democracies deteriorating into dictatorships without the cooperation of the military, government bureaucracy, business world, media, and universities.”
And those factors appear unlikely at best.
He continued that further, “Kagan offers not a word about the political forces that provoked voters to back Trump in 2015 and gave his candidacy new life in 2023. Trump tapped into festering resentments of progressive policy on trade, immigration, crime, and war, and progressive superciliousness on cultural issues. His supporters viewed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia collusion investigation and the two Trump impeachments as elite weaponizations of federal law enforcement. The four criminal indictments brought against Trump – all between April 4 and Aug. 10, 2023, more than two years after he left office and just as the 2024 campaign ramped up – have reinforced his voters’ belief that progressive elites have ridden roughshod over the law to bring him down. The reckless decision by the Colorado Supreme Court last week to remove Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot on the grounds that he violated the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on those who have ‘engaged in insurrection’ serving as president – despite his having never been charged with insurrection – adds fuel to the fire.”
Finally, Kagan advocates for throwing “everything you can” at someone like a Trump, and likened him to “a marauder” crashing into your home, the commentary said.
“Contrary to Kagan, it is hard not to fault those who have treated the laws of the land as if they were makeshift weapons to hurl at a house-invading marauder.”
Berkowitz said, however, speech is protected in America and there are procedures for determining whether conduct is unlawful.
