by Victor Davis Hanson
Trump Derangement Syndrome became Orwellian with the recent ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court.
It approved the erasure of Trump from the Republican primary ballot in Colorado, by invoking Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
That ossified clause was intended to bar any ante-bellum federal officials who joined the Confederacy from again holding federal offices after 1865.
In no way is Trump’s conduct on January 6 comparable to calling for secession, much less prompting a Civil War that cost the country 700,000 lives.
An “insurrectionist” president does not address unarmed protestors with qualifiers like, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
How also can one be guilty of insurrection without ever being indicted for such a supposed crime, much less convicted of it?
And the more we learn about January 6, all the more it appears to have been a spontaneous riot, more buffoonish in nature than conspiratorial.
No one has explained the mysterious, politicized January 6 refusal of the Speaker of the House to order a reinforcement of the Capitol police.
Or the FBI stonewalling about its informants in the crowd.
Or the revealing admissions of New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg (“a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol”).
Or the warped composition and conduct of the January 6 congressional committee.
Or the months-long official disinformation surrounding the number and circumstances of those who died that day.
That day’s illegality in terms of violence and death paled in comparison to the largely excused and exempted 120 days of summer violence in 2020, when Antifa and BLM engineered riots, arson, and death.
Their planned violence accounted for 35 or so killed, and more than 1,500 injured police officers.
Some $1-2 billion in property was destroyed.
A police precinct, federal courthouse, and iconic Washington, D.C. church were torched.
Mobs attempted to storm the White House grounds and sent the president into a secure underground bunker.
But if one really wishes to imagine genuine “insurrectionary “and actionable language, then recall current Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2020 de facto encouragement to the rioters,
But they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not.
Or remember this 2020 insurrectionary warning to two sitting Supreme Court Justices by then Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
At the very doors of the court, Schumer revved up an angry crowd with undisguised threats:
I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.
The Colorado court ruling is sadly only the most recent in a long series of disastrous firsts that are slowly unwinding the republic and making a mockery of the rule of law.
Remember the Russian collusion hoax and the 2016 Clinton/Fusion GPS effort to destroy a presidential candidate?
Recall the 2020 Russian disinformation farcical claim concerning the genuine Hunter Biden laptop?
Do not forget the precedent of impeaching a president twice and then trying an ex-president and private citizen in the Senate.
Then there was another first of raiding an ex-president’s private home over disputes about the removal of presidential papers that are typically solved bureaucratically and as a civil matter.
We are also witnessing ongoing lawfare waged by state and local partisan prosecutors to destroy the current leading presidential candidate.
Their indictments either have no merit or would never have applied to liberal politicians or both.
What will be Colorado’s precedent?
Will red-state courts now respond by erasing Joe Biden from their ballots on grounds that he is “guilty” of insurrectionary activity—by deliberately destroying the southern border, undermining U.S. security, sabotaging federal immigration law, and violating his oath of office?
Will some states remove Vice President Kamala Harris from their 2024 ballots on grounds that in 2020 she deliberately incited insurrectionary protestors who had been engaged in riot, arson, looting, violent assaults on police, and attacks on federal properties?
So does the Left see where it is taking the country?
It is destroying all the old parameters of accepted politics in using any means necessary to deny millions of citizens the right to elect their own highest official.
We have never seen anything like this before in American history. But it is only the latest chapter of an ongoing travesty that will not end well.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004.
