President Joe Biden gave a 10-minute speech Wednesday night attempting to provide a post hoc rationale for his decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race. He did not mention pressure from former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He did not mention his age or his horrific debate performance last month. He did, however, insist that he was trying to “save democracy.”
This rationale is quite peculiar. In order to “save democracy,” Biden would disenfranchise 14.3 million Democratic primary voters. These voters chose him to represent their party after Democratic elites systematically prevented more viable candidates from entering the 2024 race.
This bubbling frustration led Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., to enter the Democratic race. Phillips, who knew his track record as a member of the House of Representatives likely would not be enough to unseat the sitting president, nonetheless threw his hat in the ring because he thought Biden could not win. Cenk Uygur, creator of “The Young Turks” talk show and also a long-shot candidate, entered the race for the same reason.
Rather than allow a small-d democratic process to select their nominee, Democrats shielded Biden, helping the White House and the legacy media in their efforts to dismiss serious concerns about the president’s age and mental acuity. Meanwhile, the Republicans had a bruising primary that now has resulted in a party fully united behind former President Donald Trump.
Yet preventing a real primary was not the only thing Democrats did to undermine democracy—ironically, in the name of saving it. Many appeared to hope that attacks on Trump in the legal system would prevent the American people from having a real say in who governs them this election.
Democrats attempted to boot Trump—a former president and the leading Republican candidate—from the ballot under the pretext that he abetted an “insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021. These cases rightly failed.
Then Democratic prosecutors launched another witch hunt against the former president, bringing case after case in a transparent attempt to hamper his political campaign. Each legal case came after Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential race, even though most of them involved alleged lawbreaking from years prior.
When the Supreme Court rightly ruled that presidents enjoy immunity for some official acts, the Left went crazy because the ruling would result in a delay of legal cases that they hoped would hobble the Republican candidate in the Nov. 5 election.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has launched an extensive effort to turn the federal government into a get-out-the-vote machine likely to boost Democrats.
Biden issued an executive order heavily based on a memo from the far-left group Demos, directing federal agencies to register voters—the kind of activity political campaigns generally engage in. His administration has teamed up with other far-left groups, including the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, in a transparent effort to tip the scales in elections.
Biden may wax eloquent about “democracy” all he wishes, but his extreme rhetoric about Donald Trump shouldn’t fool the American people. After all, Americans just witnessed an assassination attempt on Trump after years in which Democrats, the legacy media, and Biden himself described Trump as authoritarian, a puppet of Russia, or a 21st-century Adolf Hitler.
If Democrats really want to “tone down the rhetoric” and “save democracy,” each should take a long, hard look at the beam in his or her own eye.