Democrats and the media have repeatedly raised the question in the last several weeks of whether President Donald Trump would leave office peacefully if he loses the election in November.
Some may actually believe their own propaganda about Trump being a “tyrant” — a point on which they agree with the knuckleheads arrested for a kidnapping plot in Michigan. Others know they are preparing a justification for pushing Trump out of office if the result is too close to call, if vote-by-mail is as messy as expected.
But the real question ought to be whether Joe Biden, the Democrats, and the media would accept a Trump victory.
They rejected it last time, and spent the last four years spinning bizarre conspiracy theories about Russian “collusion.”
Biden himself was involved, to an unknown extent in that effort. He was in the Oval Office on the day President Barack Obama was briefed about a groundless investigation into incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn — the beginning of an effort to take out Trump.
All summer long, left-wing activists have rioted in American cities during Black Lives Matter protests. Rather than condemning the violence, Democrats have tried to blame it on Trump. Biden claimed that federal law enforcement officers, dispatched by the Trump administration to save a federal courthouse from rioters in Portland, were “brutally attacking peaceful protesters.” Now he and his party claim that Trump’s rhetoric is responsible for inciting violence — even when carried out by anti-Trump anarchists.
Biden and the Democrats have even used the ongoing violence to threaten the electorate: re-elect Trump, they say, and you can only expect more of the same — from the left.
“Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?” Biden said in August — after Black Lives Matter protests, backed by Biden and his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), led to riots that laid waste to the small “uptown” of Kenosha. Wisconsin. (They belatedly condemned the violence.)
In fact, Democrats have explicitly planned for widespread unrest in the event that Biden loses.
Ben Smith of the New York Times reported in August that Democrats had planned “war games” in the event of a close election. Former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, playing the role of Biden, refused to concede defeat. “In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office as planned.” The military had to step in.
On Capitol Hill, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi isn’t waiting for the election. She announced Thursday that she would co-sponsor a bill aimed at removing Trump under the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, which provides an emergency process if the president is physically or mentally incapable of doing his job.
She has also threatened to impeach Trump — again — in the next few weeks to stop him from nominating a new Supreme Court justice. She does not want to give the voters a chance to decide.
Meanwhile, Biden blames Trump’s rhetoric for the tension in the country — while he compares the president to the infamous Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. He continues to lie to the country by claiming Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people” when Trump actually said they should be “condemned totally.”
Vice President Mike Pence debunked that hoax onstage when Harris brought it up at the vice presidential debate on Wednesday night. Biden tweeted Harris’s attack — and left out Pence’s reply.
That is not the behavior of a candidate, or a campaign, that will admit defeat if and when it loses. Clinton herself said in August that Biden should not concede the election “under any circumstances.” The left has already recruited former military leaders to the anti-Trump cause, amid talk of using troops to march him out of the White House.
After four years of sabotage, a summer of violence, and continuing Democratic incitement, the urgent question is whether Joe Biden goes peacefully, if he loses the election.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.