“Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything,” said Dostoyevsky, and indeed, we’ve become so accustomed to the manipulation of our elections that it’s become almost the norm. But the Democrats have already far exceeded even their previous serious misdeeds. Conservative complaints about this tend to be dismissed as conspiracy-mongering or poor sportsmanship. But to pretend that the Democrats’ actions since November 2020 are just part of the rough-and-tumble of politics is to ignore a mountain of evidence staring us in the face.

There is nothing normal about the presidential election of 2024—nor should we attempt to normalize it, because the Democrats’ behavior has been a tragedy for American democracy. As Matt Taibbi put it in an outstanding article analyzing recent moves from the Democrats, the “2024 presidential race increasingly looks like it will be decided by lawyers, not voters, as Democrats unveil plans for America’s first lawfare election.”

If anything, Taibbi understates the case. Democratic election interference has been so pervasive that it is hard to see how we could have an election that objective outside observers would consider free and fair. This is a grave and serious accusation to level and one which holds frightening implications for the future of American democracy. But it does us no good to hide from the truth.

The GOP Body Count

The Biden regime and its accomplices have made sure that friends and allies have paid a severe price for taking them on. My Claremont colleague John Eastman, a former law school dean and Supreme Court clerk for Justice Thomas, has been forced to pay millions of dollars in legal fees to defend himself from both criminal and civil charges over the legal advice around the 2020 election that he gave to President Trump. Lawyers are supposed to advocate aggressively for their clients. Whether or not one agrees with Eastman’s theories (and a number of conservative attorneys have supported him), there is no evidence that he did not argue them in good faith.

Nonetheless, he faces disbarment in California and criminal charges in Georgia, filed by corrupt Fulton County DA Fanni Willis. Many other Trump attorneys have already pled guilty to Georgia charges or still face legal jeopardy. But, of course, Eastman’s prosecution and possible disbarment isn’t really about Eastman. It’s about sending a message to other talented conservatives—don’t defend Donald Trump or Republicans in general or you’ll face the end of your careers, personal bankruptcy, and possibly the end of your freedom.

The people who demand that we “protect democracy” are the same people eliminating democracy. A core part of the Biden strategy, as shown in leaked campaign strategy memos, is to paint his opponent as fundamentally an “existential threat to democracy,” even as he and his allies make one anti-democratic move after another.

The federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars prosecuting and tracking down everyone in or near the Capitol on January 6, 2021, where the overwhelming majority have been charged out of all proportion to both the threat they posed and damages they caused, only a few months after authorities almost completely ignored the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests, the most economically damaging riots in American history. As the political saying goes: “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”

As Taibbi shows, leading Democrats were using the term “insurrection” within hours of the Capitol riot when few outside of perhaps Democratic political circles were thinking about what that term meant, legally and politically. Months later, as Taibbi documents, in a since-deleted tweet, Democrat uber-fixer Mark Elias specifically raised the specter of using the Fourteenth Amendment to disqualify sitting members of Congress from running for re-election and explicitly suggested litigation to remove GOP candidates from ballots, which we are now seeing in Colorado and Maine in the case of President Trump.

To some extent the radicalization of the Democrats’ tactics has grown so extreme because they must protect an extremely weak candidate. The obvious challenges of Biden’s mental decline, so vividly evident in his highly staged and limited public appearances and then documented in special counsel Robert Hur’s decision not to prosecute him over the illegal retention of classified documents, are apparent to any fair observer. This was all largely true in 2020 as well, but the compliant regime media allowed Biden to hide in his basement and never face significant questioning from reporters, using COVID as a shield. Now, seeking to protect their feeble frontrunner, the establishment has closed ranks even more tightly in 2024—declaring the New Hampshire primary non-binding and canceling its primary in Florida entirely, while driving potential threats like Robert Kennedy Jr out of the Democratic primaries, and then depriving him of Secret Service protection as an independent candidate.

The Plot Against the President

But by far the gravest of the Democrats’ sins has been the lawfare against Trump himself. Trump, as the regime media constantly reminds us, has been indicted on 91 felony counts in four criminal cases and charged with a variety of civil misdeeds. And where are these cases?—they are in 73 percent Democratic-voting Fulton County, Georgia, where the corrupt and entitled prosecutor recently put her arrogance (and ignorance of the law) on full display.

They are in 86 percent Democratic Manhattan, where a liberal judge has ordered Trump to pay a $450 million fine for an alleged “fraud” with no victims in which his lenders were paid back with a profit. The Wall Street Journal correctly called this “unprecedented” (so much so, that New York’s Governor Hochul went on the record to reassure normal borrowers that they didn’t have to worry—only Trump would be targeted this way). This has followed an equally unprecedented $82 million civil judgment against Trump in New York for defamation in another flimsy case from a highly questionable actor. Beyond that, Trump has been indicted by the feds for storing classified material at Mar-a-Lago, the same crime for which they declined to charge Biden (who had no declassification ability prior to his presidency). And of course, Trump is on trial in Washington, D.C. as well.

Trump’s legal fees in combating this illegitimate lawfare campaign in 2023 totaled more than $50 million. This was an amount equivalent to what he has spent on television ads. And the costs are far more than financial. Rather than spending his efforts on the campaign trail against Biden, the anti-Trump lawfare has ensured that he is tied up in courtrooms. “If I weren’t running none of this stuff would have ever happened. None of these lawsuits would’ve ever happened. I would’ve had a nice life!” an understandably indignant Trump said outside the courtroom after one of his most recent trials.

Regardless of your views of his guilt or innocence of any of these charges, it is almost unimaginable that Trump would have faced any of these charges were he not running for president, nor can it possibly be a coincidence that he faces all these charges on the eve of the election.

In a serious country that cared about democracy, national institutions would go the extra mile to ensure that these trials do not interfere with the election. Instead the media openly cheer for the trials in these corrupt highly-partisan jurisdictions to take place before the election.

The Danger Ahead

But it’s not just Trump, or his lawyers, or January 6 defendants who are at risk. Even ancillary enemies of the regime are targeted. A Delaware court revoked a $56 billion pay package given to Elon Musk, his reward for creating enormous shareholder value that far exceeded even this hefty sum. The decision was an unprecedented action in Delaware’s corporate history, according to the Wall Street Journal, and it was designed to send a clear signal to those opposing the regime, as are the numerous federal prosecutions and investigations of Musk-owned businesses. It was a lesson not lost on other businessmen, such as leading tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who have not bent the knee to the regime. “They’re teaching him a lesson. They want him to back down, and hope to silence other business leaders (including me),” Lonsdale wrote on X.

Combine the Democrats’ massive election interference with a presidential candidate who is not shy about calling it out and you have a potentially combustible situation. President Trump is fond of bluster, but his strongest supporters were often frustrated by how much Trump colored within the lines dictated by his enemies in his first administration. Given his treatment by the regime, it is hard to see why he would be so constrained in a second term.

I am not involved with the election nor have I advised President Trump in 2024. But Trump’s advisors are doubtless seeing the same things I have seen. It would be politically suicidal for President Trump, if upon attaining office, to let this blatant election interference go unpunished. He would be derelict in his duty not to prosecute criminally the deep-state actors going after him. He would be derelict in his duty if he did not declare total war on the administrative state that declared total war on him—and he would be derelict in his duty if he did not pursue a Lincoln-like posture against courts that tried to thwart him and his agenda in lawless demonstrations of raw politics.

And yes, this is of course a potentially dangerous course of action—but letting the Democrats spend years waging relentless lawfare against the opposing party and its leader in a manner without precedent would be even more dangerous to what is left of American democracy. It is only through relentless action against those who have declared war on him and his supporters that Trump would have any hope of restoring democratic checks and balances to a system currently run by a left-wing oligarchy with an increasingly visible iron fist.

But regardless of Trump’s strategy, and how aggressively he chooses to pursue it, the Democratic Party’s undermining of our election in 2024 has led America to the edge of the abyss.

At the very least, the Right can stop playing games and acknowledge what is staring us in the face.

As Lonsdale wrote on X, “Should we be scared, or fight harder?”

I know which course I plan to choose, and I trust that President Trump and his allies will choose similarly.