Democrats, not Trump, have been shattering our democratic norms
One of the things Democrats constantly cried about during Donald Trump's first presidential administration was how he was upsetting so many “norms” in Washington. “Norms” refers to the normal expectations for how things are done. During his first term, Democrats routinely engaged their fainting couches with the backs of their wrists pressed to their foreheads over things Trump said or how he said them.
Are Democrats really the party of norms and tradition? Obviously they are not, and the last four years proved it. But now that Trump is back, so is their love of norms.
Trump is indeed a non-traditional politician in that he does not check which way the wind is blowing. He does not conduct polls about what type of pet he should get to help his numbers. If his recent comments on Greenland prove anything, it is that he speaks his mind without waiting to see what a focus-group says. Those facts are a large part of his appeal to people outside the Beltway.
But as Democrats congratulate themselves for not objecting to the results of an election they clearly lost, it is important to remember that was not always how they behaved. In fact, it’s not how they’ve behaved at all in recent years. In that sense, they are very much like they insist Trump is when it comes to “norms.”
One thing Trump had never done before January 6th, 2021, was to call for the challenging of the results of an Electoral College vote. That certainly was an uprooting of a norm…unless you remember every presidential election Democrats have lost since 2000.
In 2000, I was in college and started writing for my school’s paper, “The South End.” While my columns are lost to the gods of the Internet (and the hard copies I have are in a box somewhere), I will always remember my first, about how Al Gore and the Democratic Party was trying to steal the election in Florida and therefore the presidency.
That attempted theft culminated with an objection to the certification of the vote of the Electoral College. The New York Times reported at the time, “Today, for nearly 20 minutes in the cavernous House chamber, a dozen members of the Congressional Black Caucus, joined by a few sympathizers, tried in vain to block the counting of Florida's 25 electoral votes, protesting that black voters had been disenfranchised.”
Further, the Times reported, “Black lawmakers defiantly declared at a news conference outside the House chamber that they did not consider Mr. Bush the legitimate president.”
Was that normal? Not at the time. Democrats did not like Republican Presidents, and Republicans did not like Democratic ones, but no mass of elected officials had previously declared a chief executive to be “not my president” the way Democrats did with George W. Bush.
In 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) expected to win the presidency. He really thought he’d win Ohio. Voters in Ohio, and the country, had a different idea.
After Florida in 2000, Democrats demanded touch-screen voting, because punching a perforated chad from a piece of paper with a pin designed expressly for that purpose had proven a bridge too far for many Democratic voters. Just four days after Bush won reelection, the stories started about computer errors with voting machines, and the conspiracy theories soon followed.
The New York Times reported at that point, “The error was discovered in preliminary vote counts from Tuesday night, and local officials say it would have been caught in any case and corrected in the final count now underway. But the glitch fed the rumors that have been flying across the internet since Election Day that results were tipped by high-tech voting machines.”
Do you remember the media outrage over this flagrant and baseless questioning of the integrity of an election — the second election in a row that Democrats had questioned? A conga line of House Democrats objected to the 2004 Electoral College certification, and there was no concern for the “norms” being set or upset. Weird, right?
The 2016 election saw another gaggle of Democrats try to overturn the election results in nine different states, ranging from Alabama to Wyoming. This included such self-proclaimed protectors of democracy as Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), whose very first act on the House Floor after his swearing-in was to attempt to block the certification of the Electoral College vote because he didn’t like the outcome. Again, no outrage or stigma attached to one of the liberal media’s favorite on-air guests.
And those are just the presidential elections they tried to overturn. Don’t even get me started on the 2018 election victory by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), or the conspiracy theories invented by definitely-not-governor Stacey Abrams (D) when she lost that year in Georgia amid record turnout.
Nor will we speak today about Democrats' ongoing (albeit largely failed) civil and criminal lawfare campaign in state and federal courts to harass, distract, and imprison the presidential candidate of the other party, transparently cooking up political charges for which no one else would ever have been prosecuted.
Nor are those the only kinds of norms Democrats have shattered. Consider, for example, how quickly today's Democrats name-call "Nazi" whenever they disagree with anyone. Just nine weeks ago, the closing argument of their election campaign was a full-blown "reductio ad Hitlerum." None of that was ever considered normal, decent, or even stable just a few years ago.
Democrats would have you believe they love and defend norms. But as with so much of what they say, the reality is quite different.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).