The public is exhausted by a decade of chronic misrepresentation by the left and its media.

The 2016 presidential election will long be remembered for Donald Trump's false claims that he conspired with Russia to skew the election results.

Citing the fake “Steele Dossier,” loser Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders claimed that the victorious Trump was an “illegitimate” president.

Immediately, the left and the media called for the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who assembled a partisan “dream team” of prosecutors to prove Trump-Russia collusion.

Nearly 22 months later, special counsel Mueller found no evidence that Trump fraudulently won the 2016 election with the help of Russian conspirators.

When President Trump was impeached in December 2019, more hysteria ensued.

Leftists alleged that he pressured the Ukrainian government to investigate corruption between the family of Joe Biden (then a potential opponent in the 2020 election) and Ukrainian oligarchs as a condition for releasing military aid to Kyiv.

But Hunter Biden was being paid nearly $1 million a year by a Ukrainian energy company in kickbacks to his father, Vice President Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden himself later bragged about pressuring Ukraine to fire the Ukrainian prosecutor, Victor Shokin, who was closely investigating the Biden family's various corrupt schemes.

The deception and lies continued.

On the eve of the first 2020 debate, Biden aide and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken assembled “51 former intelligence officials” to help make the false claim that the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned — loaded with evidence of Biden family members’ heinous deeds — was fabricated by the Russians.

However, the FBI already had the laptop and had authenticated it as authentic.

The FBI also actively solicited the cooperation of Silicon Valley social media companies in suppressing accurate reporting about the laptop's embarrassing contents, ostensibly to help the Biden campaign.

Signatories to the fake letter included former intelligence officials Leon Panetta, James Clapper and John Brennan. None of them have apologized for lying to the public in their (successful) attempt to change the results of the election.

Throughout the summer of 2021, military officials repeated the Biden administration's lie, at least publicly, that it was safe to suddenly withdraw all troops from Afghanistan.

Biden's plan was to use the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan to take political credit for ending two decades of war.

But many intelligence officials inside and outside the Pentagon had warned President Biden and his top Pentagon officials that such a reckless complete withdrawal would destroy Afghanistan.

They also rightly warned that a sudden flight would leave terrorists with unexpected access to equipment and infrastructure.

But they were ignored, and in Biden's subsequent misadventures, 13 US Marines were needlessly killed.

After the greatest military humiliation in half a century, Biden and much of the media lied and said the withdrawal operation was successful.

But that's not all: Presidential candidate Donald Trump, for the first time in history, has been hit with numerous criminal and civil lawsuits in an election year.

But assistant federal prosecutor Jack Smith was meeting with Biden administration officials, a senior federal prosecutor from the Biden administration was joining the New York City prosecution, Georgia prosecutors were secretly meeting with Biden's legal advisers, and major Biden donors were funding the civil lawsuit.

The media, once hungry for conspiracy, ignored all such legal battles and blatant collusion.

Throughout the 2020 Democratic primaries, the general election, and the first three years of the Biden administration, it was clear that Joe Biden was physically and mentally unable to serve as president.

But Biden's aides and the media all misled the American people by claiming that Biden was energetic and sharp.

Then suddenly, in June 2024, within 24 hours, Biden was declared ineligible to continue as the Democratic nominee by those same insiders.

The new problem they have with Biden is not just his long-standing embarrassing dementia: some pretty bad polls are increasingly warning that voters no longer believe their lies and therefore are unlikely to re-elect Biden, but rather that most Democrats will be punished in the upcoming 2024 elections.

And so a new media discourse was born: The once-vibrant Mr. Biden was forced to withdraw as the Democratic nominee, and his once-widely lampooned Vice President, Kamala Harris, was just as suddenly installed as his successor, by an equally enthusiastic and complicit media.

In short, for almost nine years the media and the left have successfully indoctrinated the country with a terrible string of deceptions and conspiracies.

They did so because they declared Trump too dangerous to be president and therefore believed any means they used to stop him were justified, and they are about to do so a third time in 2024.

Their continued actions have nearly destroyed our democracy, ruined the reputation of our media, alienated our people, and brought our country's humiliation on the world stage.

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 World War II: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, published by Basic Books. He can be contacted at authorvdh@gmail.com.

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