Is Election 2020 about Trump – or the Democrats?

So let’s see if we’ve got this straight. Donald Trump should be forcibly removed from the presidency and denied a place on the 2020 ballot because he attached conditions to hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in lethal aid to a nation repeatedly denied that very aid by Trump’s predecessor.

But wait, that’s not all. Trump should be taken down and off the ballot for requesting – though not receiving – an investigation of the prima facie self-dealing with a foreign country – lining the pockets of his wayward son with millions of dollars – by the second ranking member of the previous administration, who then fired the person investigating that son’s company. Why? Because that former vice president is now a candidate for president.

But we’re still not finished. Trump should be disqualified from seeking re-election – and here’s where the logic becomes twisted beyond recognition – even though he, unlike the Democrats who voted against lethal aid in the Obama years, provided the means for that country to protect itself against slaughter by the very people the left still claims, even after the Mueller investigation, to be Trump’s overlords: the Russians. Never mind that Trump has similarly withheld aid from at least five other countries.

And then we have the left’s ultimate manifestation of projecting their own sins onto Trump with the crowning script flip: Trump must be removed from the ballot because his “corrupt intent” regarding Ukraine proves that he plans to use foreign actors to interfere in the upcoming election. This, as the attorney general continues an exhaustive investigation and prepares to release what will doubtlessly be a blistering report on Democratic interference in the 2016 election. Remember the Russian-produced Steele Dossier, spying on the Trump campaign, the Strzok/Page “insurance policy” against Trump’s election, et al.

They shout from the rooftops that Trump represents a constitutional emergency, a dire threat to national security – though they never specify the nature of the threat – and thus he must be removed from office immediately. Then they wait 33 days to send their flimsy but “urgent” articles of impeachment to the Senate, where the pied piper of the Trump-hating band, Adam Schiff, offers this searing insight into mainstream Democratic thinking: “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box. For we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”

Lest you think it pure lunacy, think again. This is the essential sum of the left’s position circa January 2020.

Illogical? Of course it is, but these are the preposterous conclusions drawn from minds deformed by unmitigated hatred for a man who has stolen their power and stripped them politically down to the toes, and increasingly, for the people who voted him into the highest office in the land.

Just because this pattern of blind, banana republic-style resistance has carried on for the entire 36 months of the Trump presidency does not make it any less deeply disturbed. Consider that virtually every one of the left’s accusations of impeachment-worthy actions involve decisions that Trump has sole and undisputed constitutional authority to make.

You can simply fill in the blanks for the impeachable travesty of the month. Enforcing a travel ban? Applying immigration law at the border? Firing James Comey – or Michael Cohen? Canning the sainted Marie Yovanovich? Ignoring the advice of wizened military professionals like Col. Alexander Vindman? Setting aside the received wisdom of establishment poster child Bill Taylor? Considering the dismissal of Robert Mueller? Considering a temporary hold on foreign aid? Let’s be clear: These are all the undisputed prerogatives of the singular head of the executive branch. That would be the president.

But now leftists are all atwitter over the thin gruel provided at the perfect moment by the legendarily self-promoting narcissist, John Bolton, a trigger-happy neoconservative they long despised with every fiber of their beings but now embrace as their new best friend and comrade-in-arms, as he supposedly reveals, in a new book timed to line his pockets in an election year, that Trump wanted to tie Ukrainian military aid to investigations.

Well, you know, I wanted to get out of my car and punch the guy who cut me off at the intersection last week. Thought crime. Guilty.

Not only did the new Ukrainian president not announce, or even launch, the investigations in question, but lethal aid flowed right on schedule. Bolton’s perfectly timed “revelation” – strikingly similar to last-minute charges from left field against Brett Kavanaugh – may delay the inevitable exoneration of the president, but it changes nothing. In fact, in the category of being careful what you wish for, leftists may soon learn a valuable lesson. Are they so twisted by rage that they actually believe testimony about the desires of the president from a nakedly self-interested and bitter ex-employee, piled on top of the 18 dubious “witnesses” they already paraded before the House impeachment committee, will be worth it in exchange for an inquisition into the actual, documented corruption of the Bidens and the shadowy actions of the maestro of impeachment, Adam Schiff? They'd better think so, because that’s exactly who the GOP will call as witnesses.

Go ahead, put those cards on the table. We’ll call your John Bolton and raise you two Bidens and a Schiff.

With the wind squarely at his back – a robust economy, soaring stock market, record low unemployment, a new far-reaching Middle East peace plan, plus new trade deals with Canada, Mexico and China – Trump’s job approval, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls, has now reached its highest level since two weeks after he took the oath of office. This, at the height of Democrats’ efforts to remove him from office.

But putting aside for the moment these multiple metrics and accomplishments suggesting a glide path to re-election – which is exactly why Democrats must deny voters the chance to choose Trump again – how about the reverse angle? After their singular focus on discarding the results of the last election, and openly trashing the voters who brought about the result, what are the chances that Democrats can select anyone from their field of frightening or feeble candidates who can bear the burden of the party’s miserable public face and win back the voters they have defamed in those crucial battleground states that cost them the 2016 election?

And this is before we have even seen the dropping of that sword of Damocles hanging above their heads, the inevitably scandalous revelations forthcoming in the Barr/Durham investigation, which will surely place an even-more-scarlet letter on the Democratic Party: gross embarrassment at best, multiple indictments of high-ranking Obama officials at worst.

The Democrats put blinders on at about 2:00 a.m. on November 9, 2016, and have since staked their political fortunes on their own myopic and paralyzing hatred of the winner, blissfully unaware that their universal outrage at all things Trump is not shared by the people who will actually determine the outcome of the 2020 election. Indeed, for all the unprecedented controversy swirling around this 45th president, it may well be that the November election will actually have less to do with reaffirming Trump than simply disqualifying his opponent.

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Read more from Tim Donner.