Faced with the possible return of former President Donald Trump, the Democratic Party's current challenge can be summed up in a nutshell: “We had to destroy democracy to save it.”

These efforts have a common theme. Given the fear that a majority might vote for President Trump, any means necessary to prevent the people from electing their own president is justified.

At times, anti-democratic paranoia has been delegated to state and local officials and prosecutors to try to remove Trump from the primary and perhaps even the general election ballot.

One of Maine's unelected officials, Secretary of State Shena Bellows, is a Democrat, an official who has never been elected by the people, and a non-lawyer who makes legal proclamations. But she found Trump guilty of “insurrection.”

She promptly removed his name from the state's ballots.

But Trump was never charged with “insurrection,” much less convicted.

The law Bellows cited is the post-Civil War clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was passed over a century and a half ago. The system was not intended to be used by opposition parties to remove rival presidential candidates during election years.

In the earlier Colorado case, the all-Democratic Supreme Court voted 4-3 to remove Trump from the vote.

In total, just five officials in two states deprived nearly 7 million Americans of the right to vote for the president of their choice.

Note that polls show that Trump continues to lead incumbent President Joe Biden.

In some cases, prosecutions may be prioritized to prevent Americans from voting for or against Trump.

Currently, four left-wing prosecutors (three states and one federal) are prosecuting Trump.

They asked the courts to speed up the normally lethargic legal process to ensure that Mr. Trump would be bound nonstop to courtrooms in Atlanta, Miami, New York, and Washington, D.C., during the 2024 election cycle. I am petitioning.

Their goal is to support Trump's campaign, as he faces four left-leaning prosecutors, four liberal judges, and a four- to five-member jury with an overwhelmingly Democratic majority. is to prevent it.

But all the indictments have become increasingly controversial, if not outright scandalous.

Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis campaigned on a promise to win over Trump. She now faces allegations that she hired an unqualified personal injury lawyer to prosecute her case. The lawyer was Willis' current stealth boyfriend, who was paid handsomely by his firm and traveled with her on expensive junkets.

New York's partisan Attorney General Letitia James similarly ran into office on a promise to defeat President Trump.

She makes the ludicrous claim that Trump overvalued the real estate he pledged with banks. However, the company diligently made and profited from the loans and had no complaints, considering that President Trump repaid the principal and interest as requested.

Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg is even more desperate. He is currently prosecuting Trump for campaign finance violations dating back nearly a decade, arguing that a non-disclosure agreement with someone he allegedly had a sexual relationship with somehow violates his campaign.

Special federal prosecutor Jack Smith argued that Trump should be convicted of illegally removing classified documents after leaving office. In the past, such disagreements over presidential documents were resolved bureaucratically.

For example, after leaving the Senate and vice presidency, Biden improperly removed classified files and kept them in an unsafe location for more than a decade.

All of these prosecutors are unapologetically anti-Trump progressives.

Some have contacted White House legal staff, even though Biden is likely to face Trump in the November election.

Some prosecutors have faced controversy, if not scandal. Some want to synchronize long-term investigations and prosecutions to thwart Trump's re-election efforts.

Efforts to neutralize Trump may also be undertaken by his rival, Biden himself.

Even though Biden's own attorney general has appointed a special counsel to try Trump only on federal charges related to the January 6 demonstrations, Biden is an insurrectionist and has committed numerous egregious crimes against democracy. accused of committing a crime. He bludgeons voters to scare them.

Biden regularly denigrates the half of Americans who supported or voted for Trump as “ultra-maga” extremists and “semi-fascists” who would destroy democracy.

But the more Biden and the left weaponize the judicial system to prevent Trump from running for president, and the more Biden screams that Trump supporters are anti-American and anti-democratic, the more Trump's approval ratings skyrocket in the polls. , Biden's approval rating will decline.

The left privately knows that the historically unprecedented suppression of democracy is fueling Trump's popularity. But like an addict, I can't stop fixating on President Trump.

In short, the left has created a historic anti-democratic precedent that will one day boomerang onto the Democratic Party if they win the November elections and follow the Democrats' new extralegal political model.

Democrats are tearing the country apart in a way not seen since the Civil War era. Apparently, he is convinced that democracy itself must be sacrificed as the price of overthrowing President Trump because democracy cannot be trusted.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of Basic Books' The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.You can contact him via email authorvdh@gmail.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.