Donald Trump’s political education should make him wary

OPINION:

And why shouldn’t President Trump be alarmed that election officials in swing states are mailing out millions of absentee ballot applications to voters ahead of the 2020 election?

Think about what this guy has been through for the past four years.

First, he was told that he could never win the 2016 election.

The cavalier dismissals did not just come from left-wing crackpots reading rigged decks of Tarot cards. It was so-called “mainstream” political reporters and pundits who led the charge, followed closely by the geniuses in conservative media who claim to be the keepers of the flame of truth and conservatism.

And it was not just the media gasbags poo-poohing the Trump campaign. The entire political establishment mocked and ridiculed him. Then the sprawling government espionage apparatus launched investigations into his campaign. Ex-President Barack Obama joked publicly that Mr. Trump would never get elected.

Until he did.

Then, all the same shameless liars and thieves got together and hatched a massive conspiracy to undo the 2016 election and remove him from office. That plot began even before Mr. Trump was sworn in.

Before the election, they hated him. After the election, they hated him even more. But now they hated him and they feared him. He was no longer just one man. He was one man at the helm of a movement with a mandate in America.

Imagine the first months of Mr. Trump’s presidency once he was actually in the White House.

His national security adviser got framed by the nation’s top intelligence officials. Mr. Trump had to be left wondering if maybe there was something he had missed.

Were there nefarious actors within his campaign seeking to undermine American democracy? That is what everybody kept saying over and over, and now they had a scalp to prove it.

Then Mr. Trump meets with his FBI director, who tells him in the Oval Office that American intelligence services are in possession of incriminating evidence that he hired hookers to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel room.

Even the king of tabloids — a master of reality television — had to be looking over his shoulder around the room for the hidden camera that would reveal it was all just some kind of sick joke. Jim Comey was some kind of prankster playing the most elaborate joke in the history of the world.

But no. Mr. Comey was dead serious.

And the circus went on. And on and on and on. Even a full-blown pandemic sweeping the planet three years later would not divert the attention of Congress away from the massive effort to impeach Mr. Trump, undo the 2016 election and boot him from office.

Now comes news that election officials in swing states have hatched new plans to push mail-in voting for the 2020 election. Now, this might be something that in a remotely honest universe might sound like a good idea. But this is not a remotely honest universe.

This is a universe where everything is politics all the time and nobody ever speaks the truth.

We can all agree that greater voter participation is a good thing. Not a bad thing.

But election fraud is a very bad thing. Election fraud does not increase voter participation. It destroys voter participation. Fraudulent ballots disenfranchise legal voters.

And, as usual, the very people screaming the loudest about the sanctity of elections are the very ones doing the most to override and hijack the elections.

The very same Democrats who have falsely accused Mr. Trump of colluding with Russia to undermine U.S. elections are the very same Democrats who scream the loudest when election officials seek to protect American elections from illegal tampering. Nothing, for instance, drives these people battier than the idea of requiring voters to produce simple identification at the polls to prove that indeed they are the voters they say they are.

They are also the very same Democrats who have perfected election fraud in places like California, where special interest lobbyists are allowed to “harvest” ballots from supposedly legal voters and turn those ballots in to election officials to be counted as valid votes. The opportunity for mischief is endless.

And now, these very same people who are driven by a demonic possession to destroy Mr. Trump, the very same people who will do anything to destroy integrity in American elections, now want to hand the entire 2020 election over to the United States Postal Service.

Gee, what could go wrong?

You see, this time, these people do not labor under the false confidence that Mr. Trump cannot win. This time, they are armed with the knowledge that Mr. Trump can win. And there is nothing they will not do to stop him.

• Charles Hurt is opinion editor of The Washington Times. He can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com or @charleshurt on Twitter.