Trump Isn’t The Nation’s Greatest Threat To Democracy. His Exile Is

Former President Donald Trump is back as a candidate, but after leaving the White House, he never left the political arena — and therefore, the investigations designed to send him into political exile never let up either.

Trump’s bid for a nonconsecutive second term is faced with the same level of resistance that hampered his first, when Beltway actors weaponized the levers of government to politically terminate their public enemy number one, beginning from before day one.

In February last year, Trump became the first and only president to undergo an impeachment trial in the Senate after he had already left office. One week before Joe Biden took the presidential oath, Trump was hit with a snap impeachment from House Democrats who sought to indict the outgoing president for the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

It didn’t matter that the president had encouraged demonstrators to protest “peacefully” that day. It didn’t matter that the riot erupted before Trump had even finished speaking more than a mile down Pennsylvania Avenue. What mattered was that Trump supporters flooded the Capitol, interrupted a joint session of Congress, and gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi an opportunity to invent a new hoax in pursuit of the top item on the Democrats’ policy agenda: the criminal conviction of President Donald Trump, and with it, a lifetime ban on running for office.

On Saturday, conservative radio host Jesse Kelly wrote on Twitter, “the efforts to keep Donald Trump from being elected, remove him once he was elected, and prevent him from being elected again have done more to damage this country than anything in American history.”

Kelly’s statement might be hyperbolic, but it’s also far from inaccurate. From the Russia collusion hoax to impeachment, Democrats have normalized the radical weaponization of government institutions to thwart their opponents no matter the cost, setting the precedent for decades of political warfare to come with dangerous potential to escalate.

President Biden branded his own election and this year’s midterms as a contest over the “soul of the nation.” On Sept. 1, Biden launched the fall campaign season with a speech that looked like it was delivered out of a scene from Hell, in which he claimed Trump and the former president’s supporters “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

Contrary to these hyperventilated claims that are now routine among Democrats and the Beltway press, however, it’s the establishment’s reaction that threatens to undermine American democracy, with witch hunt after witch hunt designed to burn the orange-haired witch.

According to the Pew Research Center, trust in government remains depressed at a “near historic” low. Polling from Gallup shows fewer than 1 in 10 Americans hold “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the media, while roughly 1 in 5 approves of Congress. In August, days after the FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on the residence of a former president and future candidate, a survey from the Trafalgar Group