Former President Donald Trump has set off alarm bells among experts for anti-democratic proposals, including ideas to transform the entire civil service into a partisan army, strip independence from federal agencies, and use the Justice Department to go after political enemies.
But to hear it from Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley, President Joe Biden is has made the exact same threat to democracy — because of various executive orders he's made and because Trump has been charged with crimes while Biden happened to be in office.
"With the stroke of a pen, Mr. Biden tried to cancel half a trillion dollars in student debt, ban evictions and mandate Covid vaccines — each of which the Supreme Court blocked because Congress never gave the president the authority to do so," she wrote.
"Even after losing at the high court, his administration has used other regulatory means to write off about $770 billion in student debt."
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She also accused Biden of using the Clean Air Act to "ban gasoline-powered cars" — something that has not happened.
Finley also claimed that Biden has "failed to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, paroling millions of migrants into the U.S. rather than detaining them at the border or holding them in Mexico while they await hearings" — even though the law actually says this is the correct procedure. She didn't clarify how this is an example of authoritarianism.
"Meantime, a Justice Department special counsel has filed trumped-up charges against Mr. Trump for allegedly defrauding the U.S. Progressive prosecutors in Georgia and New York have piled on," she wrote.
Special counsel regulations are designed specifically to prevent the president and his appointed officials from having any involvement in a politically sensitive prosecution.
Finley takes all of these things to conclude that "President Biden and his supporters project their own authoritarian impulses onto Mr. Trump because they don’t want to come to terms with their own illiberalism" — and that, "The left’s depictions of Mr. Trump as a tyrant are likely to fall on deaf ears with GOP voters who have heard leftists say the same for years, and not only about Mr. Trump."
