If punishing the Democratic Party means rewarding Donald Trump, that’s a bargain the voters may prove willing to strike.

TRANSCRIPT:

There are surely millions of conflicted Americas who are sympathetic to the Democrats’ closing argument that Donald Trump is the risk to our national civic health we are reluctant to take. We hear his demeaning rhetoric about migrants, his menacing language about “the enemy from within,” his weird and unsettling infatuation with some of the worst people on earth. We don’t have to adjudicate the precise semantics about whether he meets the literal definition of “fascist”; we have heard and seen enough of him to recoil at the thought of four more years, another go-round on the (this time revenge-flecked) grimdark Trump carousel of mendacity, degradation and intimidation.

We are conflicted, however, because of this simple, enraging thought about the Democrats themselves: Are we really going to let them get away with exploiting that unease, using our doubts and manipulating our angst to validate retrospectively the damage they have wrought in the past four years and to approve proactively what they might do in the next four?

Their deceitfully vacuous campaign, its invitation to sign up to a blank slate on their plans for another term and a collective amnesia about their work in the current one, their empty pantsuit of a candidate, incessantly blurting inanities into the media void, incapable of articulating a single substantive idea for governing—what they amount to is nothing less than an abuse of the voters’ scruples, an exploitation of the yearning many have for a hint of normalcy. Don’t doubt that the Democrats fully intend to repurpose that passive desire into another sweeping mandate for their divisive and destructive ideology.

That’s the reason it seems, a week from Election Day, that enough Americans are ready to take their chances on another term for Mr. Trump. They want to tell the Democrats: You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to drive the country ever further into your new progressive dystopia, deepening our divisions and sapping our strength, and then turn around and say to the voters: Sorry, but it’s us or Hitler.

For all the talk of Mr. Trump’s character flaws, this is the unhappy political reality at the end of this long, enervating election—it’s the Democrats who have brought us to this place.

Four years ago, the former president was beaten and, like all defeated presidents in the past 130 years, ripe only for the history books. His disgraceful behavior in his final two months in office was, if not constitutionally disbarring, at least politically disqualifying. When he sulkily left office on Jan. 20, 2021, his approval rating was 34%, according to Gallup, the lowest at the end of a president’s first term since Jimmy Carter.

That should have been the end of him politically, yet his fortunes have revived—not because of some genius work of rehabilitation on his or his supporters’ part, but entirely because of his Democratic opponents’ arrogance, overreach and ineptitude.

They wilfully misinterpreted a small majority for Joe Biden, who was presented in his campaign as the personification of dull political normalcy, as a mandate for presidential and legislative activism on an historic scale. They took a country at the end of its mental tether, exhausted by a pandemic and bitter partisanship, and—using their time-honored tactic of never letting a crisis go to waste—sought to reshape it in the image of their own extremist ideals.

Bowing to a fundamentalist lunacy that walls are somehow immoral, that America owes the world a home and a living, they opened the border, unleashing socially and economically destabilizing forces that will take decades to repair.

They propagated antiscientific nonsense about “gender” and antihistorical nonsense about race that have inflicted new wounds on our social fabric and reopened old scars.

They brought shame on America’s reputation and critically undermined our strength by executing a disastrous surrender to the enemy in Afghanistan and thereby emboldening far larger foes in Europe and the Middle East.

Their zealotry helped turn the president who had left office in a cloud of shame into a figure of some pity with an excessively vengeful campaign of criminal and civil litigation aimed not only at harming his political and business prospects but at sending him to prison for the rest of his life—a campaign that backfired spectacularly and damaged trust in the idea of an independent judiciary.

They deceived the country for 3½ years about the fitness for office of the cognitively failing president. For all their talk about the threat their opponents pose to democracy, we have yet to learn how much the presidency has been run by an unelected cadre of people competing for power around an increasingly catatonic figurehead.

When the truth about Mr. Biden’s health was finally exposed, they thought they could simply swap him out for someone who hadn’t been tested in electoral competition. Anyone questioning her credentials and abilities was denounced as racist or sexist. And now their plan is to have the voters bail them out of all this misgovernance by insisting that the only alternative is totalitarian terror. Will we really make that bargain?

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