Who Really Are the Lawless and the Dictatorial?

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

The left is in its usual sanctimonious but schizophrenic mood.

The media claims daily that the Trump administration has usurped power. It is supposedly destroying democracy. It tramples on the rule of law and thus has created a virtual dictatorship.

Yet at the same time, Democrats high-five the most recent district court judge who has put a stop to the current Trump executive orders—which the Trump administration abides by as it files appeals.

There are two clear conclusions from the flurry of the lower-court liberal justices’ orders: 1) Trump has obeyed their record number of interventions as the appeals go forward; and 2) rarely in the history of the republic has a pool of some 300-400 left-wing district judges exercised such nationwide control over the executive branch and indeed the entire nation.

Yet consider the array of double standards.

Donald Trump is accused of improperly dictating to private elite universities who choose to apply for and receive federal funds. At least, lower court cherry-picked justices predictably rule so.

But please spare us the district courts’ sermons on truth, justice, and the American way, given their lodestar is often ideology, not principled adherence to the law.

After all, Trump is only following the precedents of the Obama administration. With legal impunity, it had threatened fines and worse to public and private universities that did not fully implement Title 9 to Obama’s subjective standards.

Indeed, the Obama Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, in an unconstitutional fashion, habitually threatened colleges and universities (“Dear Colleague…”) with a cutoff of federal funds if they did not comply with its weird version of addressing charges of campus sexual harassment. For the “constitutional lawyer” Obama, gone was the American creed that Americans accused on campus were innocent unless proven guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

For the Harvard Law graduate Obama, gone were even past administrative rules that required “clear and convincing evidence” to convict the accused.

Instead, it ordered campuses to adopt its new Orwellian standard that a mere “preponderance of the evidence” might find the targeted guilty—or risk losing federal funds.

Hillsdale College long ago declined federal subsidies and grants, only to be a target of petty, even spiteful, federal harassment from both the Obama and Biden administrations.

Imagine what would be our current district court judges’ attitude toward an administration’s “interference” in denying federal funds to a campus that allowed black students to be serially harassed and assaulted on campuses—and their attackers honored by the university, in the manner that Jewish students and their assailants are today at Harvard. Would a judge really forbid the federal government from attaching conditions to its optional funding, requiring campuses to follow the law and protect at-risk students?

Imagine what district judges would say should visiting white South African students, here on student visas, trash the libraries of their hosts and rough up minority janitors or surround a library to threaten students of color trapped inside—and do so with assumed campus impunity?

Would our principled district judges really forbid a Democratic administration from holding back federal funds to force sanctimonious college presidents to stop such racially inspired campus violence?

Would the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rule that universities had violated the corpus of civil rights legislation and the 2022 Supreme Court decision if they ever allowed segregated “European-American” auxiliary graduations or de facto segregated Euro-dorms (“theme houses”)?

What if African-American students with higher test scores and GPAs on average than their white counterparts were systematically discriminated against in admissions to ensure that the incoming admitted class was composed of roughly no more than two percent black males —perhaps in the manner of the last few years when about 9 percent of the incoming Stanford classes were apparently designated white males (who make up 33-35 percent of the population)?

Would the lower courts stop a Democratic administration that forced such a racially discriminating university to follow prior civil rights court decisions and federal laws—or else?

Would our lower courts rebuke a Democratic administration that had warned a campus to abide by protections of the First Amendment if they wished continuance of federal funds—and thus, say, stop white male frat students from shouting down, disrupting, harassing, and threatening a speech of a transgendered visiting federal judge—as one of its own right-wing male administrators hijacked and prematurely ended the guest’s lecture?

When CBS’s Scott Pelley hijacked a graduation address to deliver a Bruce Springsteen-like rant against Trump, the purported tyrant, did he specify how the elected president has trampled the Constitution? Does Trump’s press secretary selectively edit her transcripts, as CBS does, to show the president in a more favorable light?

Has Trump followed any of the precedents established during the prior four years of the Biden administration?

Did he, Mr. Pelley, coordinate local, state, and federal prosecutors to warp the law and try to imprison his 2020 and 2024 political opponent?

The left talks of Elon Musk as a Trump oligarch threatening democracy. Has Musk been convicted of a felony charge of insider trading in the manner that billionaire and donor George Soros was in France? Is he now in prison like left-wing mega-donor and disgraced oligarch Sam Bankman-Fried?

Note well that in the days after Trump’s 2022 announcement to seek reelection, the Biden DOJ appointed Jack Smith as a federal prosecutor to prosecute Trump.

At roughly the same time, Nathan Wade, the lead prosecutor for Fani Willis’s Georgia prosecution of Trump, mysteriously showed up in Washington to meet with the White House counsel. Why?

Stranger still, Matthew Colangelo—formerly the DOJ’s third-ranking prosecutor and a key figure in Letitia James’s ridiculous New York case—left the department once again to rejoin the legal campaign against Trump by leading Alvin Bragg’s municipal prosecution of Trump.

Note also that Smith left his billet under a cloud of ethics conflicts after receiving free legal services and not initially reporting such gifted conflict-of-interest income. Fani Willis was forced off her prosecutions for numerous ethical violations and indeed fined for not turning over subpoenaed documents. Letitia James is currently facing federal investigations ranging from mortgage, mail, and banking fraud to falsification of documents.

So far, Trump has not sent the FBI to raid the multiple Biden residences to search for more classified documents, given Biden’s serial history of improper possession of such materials.

Did Jack Smith, in Robert Hur fashion, ever claim that Trump was not feasibly prosecutable because he had a poor memory, perhaps citing the illustrious work of fired Yale psychiatrist professor and left-wing heartthrob Dr. Bandi Lee, who had earlier tele-diagnosed Trump as demented?

Are any red states currently coordinating to take the 2028 Democratic nominee off their state ballots following the lead of democratic Democrats?

Trump was certainly not nominated by Republican Party insider fiat in 2024. Instead, he ran as a maverick disruptor and won the nomination in open primaries. Kamala Harris was selected by Democrat insiders—despite never having won a single delegate or primary vote in her two nomination bids.

Joe Biden, whose prior 2020 nomination was fixed by party insiders, won the 2024 nomination by winning 14 million primary votes. But he was kicked off the ticket by the same party insiders and donors who had orchestrated his prior nomination. Is that the new Democrat-style of democracy of nullifying the wishes of 14 million voters?

The left talks endlessly of the “rule of law.” But they have crafted a funny sort of selective and self-interested jurisprudence. If a local or state entity decides it does not find federal immigration convenient, it simply defies federal orders to turn over those who have entered and resided in the country illegally, even or especially in the case of the detained who have committed crimes.

In the ancient days, Americans called that defiance “nullification.” Indeed, it was always associated with “states’ rights,” and a long history of insurrectionary illegality from the Confederacy to George Wallace standing in the door of the University of Alabama.

But the left now calls those entities that nullify federal laws “sanctuary cities”—although it would go ballistic should a red country similarly declare the federal Endangered Species Act or gun registration laws nullified in their “sanctuary” jurisdictions. Indeed, a Democrat administration would likely apply a January 6-like preventative detention and indefinite incarceration to any such nullifying “insurrectionaries.”

Are the Trump White House and the Republican majority Senate now maneuvering to end the filibuster as the Democrats once threatened? Are they trying to pack the Supreme Court to ensure more appointments before 2029, in the fashion that Democrat presidential candidates used to promise? Or are they threatening to end the Electoral College as Democrats habitually bluster?

I do not remember, during the current Trump tenure, the FBI suppressing knowledge of evidence in the manner of its Biden-era smothering of Hunter’s authenticated laptop to influence an election. Are Trump’s FBI lawyers doctoring evidence to frame their targets à la Kevin Clinesmith?

In Trump’s first 120 days, I don’t recall FBI Director Kash Patel leaking confidential presidential conversations to the New York Times, or ordering the FBI to collect dirt on Democratic candidates, or hiring a fraudulent ex-British spy to compile a lurid dossier on AOC or Bernie Sanders. Has Patel lied four times to federal investigators following the prompt of Andrew McCabe?

Nor has Patel ordered his agents to work with Facebook and Twitter to suppress embarrassing press coverage about the Trump family.

The Trump Secret Service is not a private retrieval service that hunts down his children’s missing, lurid diaries or incriminating lost laptops or illegally acquired lost handguns.

Is there now a White House-conservative media cabal covering up a Trump cancer diagnosis or demonstrable senility?

So far, the Trump CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, have not repeatedly lied under oath to Congress, following the precedents of the Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper.

So please, spare us the sanctimonious lectures on “tyranny” and “dictatorship” from the very ideologues who have done and are doing more to wreck the Constitution and destroy the confidence of the American people in the rule of law than any generation in modern memory.