The first assassination attempt against Donald Trump dealt a serious blow to Democrats’ pursuit of the so-called “democracy issue” in 2024. The second assassination attempt against the former president this weekend may have nixed it for good.
Since Trump announced his re-election bid in 2022, few talking points have been more central to Democrats’ political brand—and to Joe Biden’s now-defunct presidential campaign—than the notion that Trump is a “threat to democracy” and that “democracy is on the ballot.” But following the authoritarian bent of the Biden-Harris administration, Kamala Harris’s decidedly un-democratic ascension to the top of the ticket, and the first attempt on Trump’s life, Democrats had all but ditched the “democracy” schtick.
As many conservatives pointed out following the shooting at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally in July, Democrats’ insistence that Trump’s mere presence in the race is an “existential threat” to democracy encourages the sort of violence that nearly took Trump’s life and did lead to the death of an innocent bystander and the shootings of two others. The Trump campaign itself published more than two dozen instances in which leading Democrats called Trump a “threat to democracy” in the weeks and months leading up to that fateful day.
Now that a second attempt has been made on Trump’s life, conservative cries that elected Democrats’ rhetoric is encouraging this sort of violence have even more credence. Early reports indicate that, like the rally shooter, the individual who tried to assassinate Trump while he was playing golf in Florida was fueled by left-wing partisanship and hatred for Trump.
Moreover, some Democrats, while claiming to be the party “defending democracy,” are now implicitly blaming Trump for the assassination attempts against him. They are outrageously suggesting that Trump brought the attacks on himself by spreading “hateful rhetoric” about illegal aliens – in effect trying to scare their political opponent into not talking about one of his strongest issues with less than two months to go until Election Day.
As such, voters will likely find Democrats’ obsession with the “democracy issue” even less palatable than they did before. Along with encouraging would-be assassins, the Democrat Party is now associated in the eyes of the American people with working in plain sight to imprison their leading political opponent, using bogus legal theories to try to keep him off the ballot, censoring dissenting views on social media, labeling patriotic parents as domestic terrorists, persecuting Christians and pro-life activists, depriving states of their right to manage their own elections, and importing millions of illegal aliens against the will of voters through an open southern border.
Another devastating blow to Democrats’ “democracy” narrative came this summer, when Democrat Party elites unceremoniously disenfranchised 14 million primary voters who cast their ballots for Joe Biden by forcing him out of the race. They then replaced him with someone who had not received a single vote.
After all of these developments, the jig is clearly up. Democrat Party leadership is now forced to grapple with the reality that voters, even loyal Democrats, can no longer possibly buy into their disingenuous “democracy” narrative.
Even the corporate media and left-wing news outlets have taken note of the ongoing rhetorical shift. “When President Joe Biden argued against the Trump agenda this year, he more frequently cited ‘democracy’ as the American value most in peril,” The Washington Post reported in August.
But now, the Post continued, “since Biden stepped aside in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris—incredibly, just over a month ago—‘freedom’ has come roaring back into fashion for Democrats, part of what seems to be a wholesale renovation of the party’s persuasive language.”
“Freedom,” it seems, is the new “democracy” for Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party. But what exactly does that timeless American virtue mean to them, and is the left’s definition of “freedom” similarly at odds with the public’s interpretation of that word as much as Democrats’ version of the word “democracy” was?
A look at Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the DNC Convention earlier this summer is instructive.
“In this election, many… fundamental freedoms are at stake,” Kamala said during those remarks, the first of 12 times she said the word “freedom.”
Two more of those mentions were used in the context of “reproductive freedom”—or the “freedom” to kill an innocent human being in the womb. Despite the fact that polling indicates more than seven in 10 Americans oppose abortion after 15 weeks and nearly 80 percent of Americans reject Democrats’ policy of unrestricted late-term abortion-on-demand, nowhere did Harris mention the freedom of a baby to be born.
Another use of “freedom” was in the tired liberal line of having “freedom to live safe from gun violence” – a euphemism for Democrats’ crusade to destroy the Second Amendment, taking with it Americans’ constitutionally-guaranteed right to defend themselves, their families, and their property.
Another “freedom” mention was in the context of the left’s LGBTQ+ agenda – as Harris said, “the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride.” Democrats have used this benign-sounding “freedom” as an excuse to target religious Americans and even go after parents who refuse to raise their children according to left-wing gender ideology, threatening the Constitution’s free exercise of religion clause and the freedom of parents to raise their own children.
Harris also asserted the “freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” For Harris and Democrats, this “freedom” entails Democrats dismantling a slew of traditional freedoms that everyday Americans have enjoyed for generations, from the freedom to drive a gas-powered car to the freedom of tens of thousands of Americans to enjoy gainful employment in the coal, oil, and natural gas industries.
Another use of “freedom” was in support of the so-called “Freedom to Vote Act,” a Democrat bill that would deprive states of the ability to run their own elections, allow leftists in Washington, D.C. to trample election security, and redistrict Republicans out of power. As Harris suggested, Democrats also believe in the “freedom” to vote without any sort of ID or proof of citizenship.
In essence, what Harris and Democrats mean when they talk about “freedom” in the context of our elections is freedom for Democrats to end American democracy as we know it.
Leftists more generally have also regularly invoked language of “liberty” and “freedom” to defend hot-button left-wing priorities like Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools, males who claim “transgender” status competing in female sports, and using the arm of the federal government to unconstitutionally target Christians, conservatives, and Democrats’ political opponents.
Of course, the warped vision of “freedom” advanced by Harris and other Democrats is completely out of step with the freedoms envisioned by our Founding Fathers nearly 250 years ago. And today, a resounding majority of Americans firmly stand against it – just as they rightly stood against Democrats’ bastardization of “democracy” that put a target squarely on the back of the left’s top political opponent.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
