The 2023-2024 election season will not only be the strangest on record, but also perhaps the most anti-democratic.

Officially, Democrats have argued for the past decade that former President Donald Trump posed an ongoing, existential threat to the republic.

These allegations have since justified a range of anti-democratic tactics aimed at undermining Trump's first two presidential bids, his term as president, and now his third and final run for president.

Nearly a decade ago, in 2015 and 2016, we witnessed efforts by Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and the FBI to spread false accusations of Trump-Russia collusion and distort the 2016 election.

The scheme revolved around the forgery of the Steele dossier, which dealt a fatal blow to Trump's 2016 campaign — a hoax that would later derail 22 months of Trump's presidency and ultimately prove to have been a delusion.

On the eve of the 2020 election, the left launched the Russian laptop disinformation campaign, which distorted the presidential debate with false accusations that Hunter Biden’s own incriminating laptop was the work of Russians trying to conspire with Trump again.

These unusual efforts continued under the Biden administration.

For the first time in election history, allies of one campaign have tried to convince about 16 states to remove a major party's leading candidate from the primary and general election ballots.

The plan was to block President Trump's third presidential bid at an early stage, preventing the public from again deciding whether to accept or reject his candidacy.

At roughly the same time, four federal, state and local prosecutors filed lawsuits against Trump alleging dozens of felony charges.

They all had something strange in common.

These indictments probably wouldn't have come about if Trump hadn't run for president, and none of them would have gone forward if Trump wasn't a controversial conservative Republican running for reelection.

Nearly all of the allegations have not been brought against any other candidate before, and almost never against a civilian.

Some of them could just as easily have been brought against President Joe Biden and his son.

Some indictments and convictions could still achieve the goal of bankrupting Trump, jailing him or putting him out of action during the final weeks of the campaign.

One of the Georgia prosecutors had a private meeting with a White House adviser to President Biden.

Biden himself effectively declared his campaign rival Trump guilty on the eve of federal prosecutor Jack Smith's indictment.

Biden's White House chief of staff also met privately and secretly with Smith's aides.

In unprecedented fashion, Smith rushed the indictment to ensure it was synchronized with the 2024 election campaign.

A similar federal indictment could have easily led to Biden's indictment if the special prosecutor in that case had not argued that he failed to persuade a jury to convict a guilty but cognitively impaired Biden.

Another Biden administration prosecutor mysteriously resigned from his top Justice Department position to join Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg's staff.

Nevertheless, Trump overcame conspiracy, disinformation, vote invalidation, legal battles and a subsequent assassination attempt to emerge from the dead to take a large lead over Biden in the polls for the presidential election in June.

Biden's collapse in the polls prompted Democratic donors and senior politicians to push for a stress-test presidential debate before either candidate is nominated at their respective party conventions.

When Biden collapsed in the debate, a once-fitting president was suddenly declared incompetent, and a previously lackluster Vice President, Kamala Harris, was suddenly transformed into a formidable successor.

Biden was forced to withdraw his candidacy to protect his remaining five months in office after Democrats threatened to remove him from office under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.

The primary ballots of about 15 million voters were suddenly invalidated.

Harris, who did not win a single delegate in the primary or general election, was suddenly selected as Biden's successor without any public debate or vote at the party convention.

Moreover, the political donor class has decided that Harris, like Biden, will not be allowed to hold press conferences in a presidential contest in 2024. Harris will likely not give live interviews, unscripted town hall meetings or other appearances due to fears that her visible shortcomings could jeopardize her candidacy.

In other words, a party that has declared that democracy dies in darkness has come to favor shadow as its preferred means of gaining and retaining power by ignoring voters in primary elections, open party conventions, and transparent forums with voters.

Add together the last decade's bribed collusion spree, two unprecedented impeachments, the orchestrated disinformation spree, the efforts to nullify Trump's votes, the distortion of the legal system to imprison him and destroy his candidacy, the forcible removal of an unpopular and unwilling President Biden from the Democratic Party nomination list, the de facto appointment of Ms Harris by executive order in his place, and the ongoing complicity of a compliant media to avoid public scrutiny and cross-examination of Ms Harris.

The conclusion?

Have those who were telling us that democracy was in danger now decided to save it by destroying it?

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.