Over there at the left-wing bastion that is The Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus is alarmed.
Marcus headlined recently:
Trump doesn’t just want to win. He wants revenge.
Marcus writes:
It can happen here — again. Our nation survived the first time. I’m not at all confident about the second.
The news brings two stories, separately alarming, together bone-chilling. “Trump leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds,” the New York Times reports. In Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania — in every presidential battleground state but Wisconsin, where he leads by a scant two percentage points — President Biden trails former president Donald Trump. The average margin is 48 percent to 44 percent, Trump
….Given the razor-thin closeness of the 2020 election, this is a hair-on-fire situation.
Especially because of the second story. “Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term,” report The Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett. As they detail, Trump and allies “have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
One can only shake one’s head at the utter ignorance of both American history and the current history of the Biden administration.
Marcus, without a hint of irony, writes that “Trump and allies ‘have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute…’”
Hello?
You mean like the Biden administration has done - and is doing - to Trump?
Literally there have been so many indictments of Donald Trump that they have their own Wikipedia entry.
The federal government - run by Joe Biden and his cronies - have indicted Trump in Florida on “40 criminal charges alleging mishandling of sensitive documents and conspiracy to obstruct the government in retrieving these documents.”
Joe Biden, famously, has been caught doing the same. With a mammoth stash of “sensitive documents” from his time both as Vice President and Senator before that stashed in his garage - right next to his beloved antique corvette.
Indictments of Biden? Nowhere to be seen.
Next is the Biden Justice Department orchestrating “four criminal charges of conspiring to defraud the government and disenfranchise voters, and corruptly obstructing an official proceeding.”
All of this well aside from Democrat prosecutors in New York and Georgia prosecuting Trump for everything from fraud with his business (in New York) and demanding election integrity (in Georgia.)
In short, it is President Joe Biden’s administration - not a future Trump administration - that has set the seriously dangerous precedent of weaponizing the federal government to prosecute Biden’s major past and potentially future political opponent. Biden has weaponized the Justice Department and the FBI before that to go after his leading political opponent.
Biden and company are busy turning America into a third world banana republic - without a peep of dissent from Ruth Marcus or her paper. Now, suddenly, with the polls showing that Trump could in fact be re-elected, Marcus panics that Trump would, once elected, use the Biden precedent to set the federal government on Trump opponents.
Then there is this line from Marcus: Trump would invoke “the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”
Again. Hello? There would be nothing new about this.
Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush have all used the Insurrection Act to deal with political unrest.
In the case of LBJ, he unleashed the Insurrection Act in 1968 when riots broke out in over 100 cities following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.In the case of Washington, D.C. Johnson sent in the National Guard as the rioting in the nation’s capital became so intense that 13 people were killed, approximately 1,000 people were injured and over 6,100 arrested.
In the summer of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, over 500 riots broke out across the country. When Senator Tom Cotton wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times calling for invoking the Insurrection Act, the staff of the Times blew a gasket, so much so that the Opinion Page Editor was forced to resign simply for allowing a thoughtful U.S. Senator with a serious military background to publish his support for using the Insurrection Act.
Without a trace of irony, Marcus says that the Trump “Sycophants Wanted sign is already out.”
Hilariously she cites decided Washington Establishment figures to attack Trump, blissfully unaware that she is defending what might be called Washington Establishment sycophants.
"It is time to be very, very afraid,” Marcus concludes.
So to cut to the chase? This very minute the Biden administration has weaponized the Department of Justice. It has targeted for indictment and arrest - complete with mug shot - President Biden’s leading political opponent. And meanwhile various Democrats in this or that state are trying to keep Trump off the ballot.
And not a peep of objection from Marcus or The Post.
Why?
It would, sadly, appear that the answer is as long as the government is weaponized to target Trump, it’s OK.
But if Trump is elected and turns the tables? With Biden’s actions as a precedent? Ohhhhh the humanity! The Constitution!
One would think that even a left leaning journalist would understand that weaponizing the federal government to target a president’s opponents is both wrong and dangerous.
Alas, that would not be the case.
Which, in turn, speaks volumes about the leftist mind set.
