Democrats treat the Republican opposition, and President Donald Trump in particular, the way that Russian President Vladimir Putin treated Alexei Navalny, the 47-year-old opposition leader who died in prison last week after years of brutal persecution.
Of course, Democrats were quick to seize on Navalny’s death to attack Trump. President Joe Biden even suggested Trump was siding with Russia — a revival of the “collusion” hoax that prevents Democrats from seeing the totalitarian nature of their own behavior.
But consider the fact that Democrats — through the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, and through elected Democrat prosecutors in New York and Georgia — want to put Trump in prison for the rest of his life.
They have charged Trump with crimes whose combined penalties exceed 700 years. One of the federal charges Trump faces even carries a potential death penalty, under an obscure statute passed in the 19th century. (Prosecutors claim they are not seeking that penalty, but the message was sent.)
In New York, a Democrat judge found Trump liable for civil fraud without letting him mount a defense. Attorney General Letitia James, who ran for office vowing to target Trump, used an obscure fraud statute in a completely new way to target Trump — though he had not intended to defraud anyone, and the big banks that he dealt with were not harmed in any transactions.
Trump was hit with a massive fine that he has to pay before he can appeal, and James said she would seize his buildings if he did not.
That is exactly how Putin treats opposition leaders and dissident oligarchs in Russia today, using the same tactics that he learned as a KGB agent in the Soviet Union.
Navalny himself saw the parallels in 2021, when he protested against Trump being censored by Twitter.
American social media companies have censored information that Democrats do not want the public to know, as well as people who are critical of the party. Just ask Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who wanted a journalist banned for reporting on him.
That censorship is not simply the result of private companies acting independently, as Democrats and Democrat-friendly media outlets have claimed. The evidence is clear: the White House pressured social media companies to violate the First Amendment on its behalf.
Moreover, the Department of Justice has pursued the administration’s declared political enemies. It has prosecuted hundreds of non-violent January 6 protesters, holding many of them for months in pretrial detention, often ruining their lives.
It is now prosecuting an informant whose crime appears to have been giving false information about a very real pattern of corrupt behavior by President Biden and his relatives, who made millions of dollars by selling access to foreign investors and interests.
The Department of Justice did not punish Christopher Steele for the “Russia collusion” hoax, which sought to overturn the 2016 election, nor were most of the perpetrators prosecuted or even punished. Many of them hold high positions in the administration.
Today, Democrats are trying to exclude Trump from the ballot in many states, just as Putin barred Navalny from running against him in 2017. The given reason, the UK Guardian noted at the time, was “because of [Navalny’s] conviction in a fraud case which has been viewed as political retribution.”
Does that sound familiar? It is similar to the playbook being run against Trump — by the very people who refused to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 win, and who now claim that they are “defending democracy.”
The Biden administration is announcing new sanctions against Russia this week to punish Putin for Navalny’s death. No doubt Putin is a bad actor.
But is he worse than Biden, whose campaign enlisted 51 national security officials to lie about his son’s laptop, then cited that lie in a debate to win an election?
An election conducted largely by mail, a practice considered potentially fraudulent by most other democracies?
At least Trump stood up to Putin. Democrats not only appease him, but imitate him.
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). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.