Op-Ed: Dems’ Double Standards Exposed

Observers of human nature know that people commonly endorse information confirming their existing beliefs rather than objectively considering conflicting evidence.

Although such confirmation bias is a well-known impediment to objective thinking, a less familiar obstacle involves the tendency to blindly favor people belonging to one’s political group while reflexively projecting exaggerated criticism across the aisle.

And nowhere is this double standard mentality more clearly expressed than in our current political climate. For while the Democratic Party’s knee-jerk acceptance of any progressive belief, action, media source, or person remains constant, their habitual hatred of Donald Trump continues to escalate.

And this is so even if the impetus for their hypocritical attacks is identical to behavior ignored, fawned over, or even applauded when initiated by one of their own.

While obvious examples of such in-group bias are too numerous to mention, no discussion of Democrats’ double standards would be complete without referencing their differing responses to border security when comparing Trump to his progressive predecessors.

Calling Trump’s immigration policies “cruel” and “inhumane,” Joe Biden, as senator, supported funding a 700-mile fence at our southern boundary.

Moreover, even though Kamala Harris described Trump’s border wall as “un-American” and a “medieval vanity project,” in 2024, she, too, supported legislation that included border wall funding in previous years.

However, those same Democrats and their media allies attacking Trump’s border actions hailed Bill Clinton when he stated that all Americans “are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country … the public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. … That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders.”

Additionally, Barack Obama was also cheered for issuing far more migrant removal orders than any predecessor, building more than 100 miles of border wall, and stating, “real reform means stronger border security.”

But none of these Democratic icons were attacked for insensitive and xenophobic immigration policies, as was Trump.

More recently, many on the left are unhinged over Trump’s initiative to downsize the bloated federal government by reducing waste, fraud, and abuse. Direct from their “Trump is Hitler” playbook, woke criticism has labeled such efforts as dangerous, authoritarian, and even unconstitutional.

Yet, no such exaggerated attacks were heard in 1993 when announcing that in living “within its means … the era of big government is over,” Bill Clinton attempted to slash wasteful spending and reduce the national debt by cutting almost 400,000 federal jobs. And even when Trump channeled his inner Clinton in supporting that same objective, Democrats offered nothing but condemnation.

Yet, on a more personal level, Democrats’ double standards are equally disturbing. And nowhere is such hypocrisy clearer than when comparing Biden’s threat to withhold aid to Ukraine in 2016 to Trump’s impeachment two years later.

In the first instance, Biden threatened to forgo such assistance unless the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the company employing his son was immediately fired. At the time, not only did Biden threaten, “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting your money,” but in 2018, when Ukrainians capitulated, he gloated, “Well, son of a b****, [the prosecutor] got fired.”

However, when Trump encouraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to determine why the prosecutor was dismissed, he was impeached for a “staggering abuse of power,” withholding foreign aid, and a “betrayal of the public trust” in seeking to embarrass Biden for self-serving political ends.

It did not matter that during his July 2019 phone conversation with Zelenskyy, Trump never specifically linked aid to probing Biden’s actions to shield his son’s corrupt oil company.

It did not matter that after a pause, Trump granted lethal aid, the first president to do so. And it did not matter that Trump’s concerns about Biden’s influence peddling were clearly valid.

Once again, the double-standard holier-than-thou Democrats ignored Biden’s far more egregious quid pro quo actions and contrastingly threatened Trump with removal from office.

Yet the most omnipresent category of Democrats’ double standards has been to microscopically verify every claim uttered by Trump and to negatively parse his every sentence at the expense of truthful context. And such doubled-down partisanship has been especially true when judging Biden’s character in general and his autobiographical inventions in particular.

A small sampling of Biden’s foot-in-mouth disease would include his assertions that he was arrested for trying to see Nelson Mandela in South Africa and for attending civil rights sit-ins at home. It would also include his claims that he was appointed to the Naval Academy, finished at the top of his law school class, and was a teaching professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Even downplaying Biden’s penchant for plagiarism, he also falsely insisted he was raised in a Puerto Rican community, that he was a coal miner, that he visited Ground Zero a day after Sept. 11, 2001, and that his son died a war hero in Iraq.

And yet, despite Biden’s pathological lying, woke pundits often described Biden’s “folksy” falsehoods as merely “embellished narratives” and continually state that Trump has lied thousands of times.

But for tone-deaf progressives, continuing such hypocrisy has a cost best expressed when things are bad as “You can’t fall off the floor.” For in relentlessly continuing their double-downed sacrifice of even-handed integrity into Trump’s second term, the Democratic Party disproves that maxim by impossibly doing precisely that.

The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either d or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.

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