The Trump ballot question

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” Ronald Reagan once said, but the 40th president could never have known just how right he was.

At the time it was spoken and forever since, Reagan’s statement has been taken to refer mainly to the excesses of the federal bureaucracy: the shameful, wasteful, pernicious but still rather comical unintended consequences of the administrative state. In hindsight, however, Reagan’s insight foretold something far more ominous, intrusive, and pervasive. 

Today, we live in the shadow not merely of incompetent but well-intentioned government do-gooders but an elite expert class. Assured of its own superior intelligence, values, and status, the elected and unelected brethren of this class seek not so much to instruct citizens on how to live their lives but to do some of the living for them. Take the once-uncontroversial matter of gas stoves. For those poor souls convinced that grilling salmon contributes to the melting of the ice caps, it’s not sufficient to argue against the use of gas appliances in homes, possibly because they realize that no one would listen to them, so they have turned to measures that, in some cities and states, have led to bans of the stoves themselves. For an elite certain of its own virtue, and equally certain that the great unwashed has long since stopped respecting them, why bother with persuasion? 

In hindsight, former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was the leading indicator of the mindset among our new overlords: Personal choice is all well and good so long as the public reaches the right choice, and if people have to be somehow compelled to reach that right choice, so be it. If you were a 30-something freelancer, entrepreneur, or gig worker who, for whatever reason, was considering forgoing health insurance, Obamacare’s penalty-by-tax return sought to banish such thoughts from your mind. The idea was to lead you to make the correct decision by removing you from your own decision-making process.  

Indeed, during the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials and their elected flunkies viewed personal choice as a nuisance they could not be bothered with. The same set of assumptions that governed Obamacare led to the imposition of mask mandates and vaccine cards. The thinking went something like this: Lacking the scientific bona fides of Drs. Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Francis Collins, et al., citizens simply could not be counted upon to heed the good doctors’ advice. Therefore, it was no longer “advice” — it was the law of the land. Mandates rendered citizens’ private judgment moot.

Now we come to the 2024 presidential election, which the elite has deemed too consequential, too important, too dangerous, in the sense that the “wrong” outcome might be attained through the election of Donald Trump, to be decided by the fickle finger of fate. No matter that “fate,” in this reading, is the decision of a plurality of voters on Election Day. By the lights of the elite class, however, the evil of Trump is as self-evident as the necessity of masking and vaccines to quell the spread of COVID-19, and anyone who dissents must be overruled. Therefore, the election must be rebranded as a kind of pandemic: a federal emergency that requires government intervention to protect us from ourselves. 

Over the last year, we have seen an extraordinary series of actions that seek to render Trump not unelectable at the ballot box but unelectable before he even reaches the ballot box. Trump is correct when he refers to the prosecutions against him in New York, in Georgia, and by special counsel Jack Smith as tantamount to “election interference.” Even if some of these cases have a kernel of legitimacy or might have been pursued against Trump had he not been running for office, the fact remains that they have not been brought in an ideal world but in this world. These trials and their outcomes may have the practical effect of making voters’ preferences in the election dependent on the whims of judges and juries. 

Perhaps sensing that Trump will draw out, bog down, and possibly prevail in some of these cases — and certainly realizing that, short of a conviction, Trump stands as good a chance as he did in 2016 and in 2020 of winning the White House — the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine secretary of state have decided they have had enough of these pesky voters who remain attached to the Trump era of relative global peace, low unemployment, and robust border security. These people, the elites know in their hearts, will never learn. So, in Colorado and Maine, the 14th Amendment, the far Left’s new favorite part of the Constitution following the failure of the much-vaunted 25th Amendment, has been invoked to remove Trump from the ballot and thus eliminate any chance that the weak-minded among us will check the box beside his name. Don’t make arguments against Trump. Just delete his name. 

I credit all of these institutions and officials with a measure of good faith: They are probably sincere in their belief that Trump is a menace, but understand that they are equally sincere in their belief that the public — that’s you — is too ignorant, prejudiced, and mercurial not to vote for him. Dear reader, they have no more confidence in your ability to vote for someone other than Trump than they did in your decision to wear a mask or get a vaccine. This is the final fruit of our commissars treating personal decisions, such as whether to wear a mask amid a pandemic or whom to vote for, as being subject to their advice and consent. Astonishingly, the elites have convinced themselves that some candidates for office are not only unfit for office but unfit even to stand for office and that it is they who shall make the determination. They forget that the sorting of worthy and unworthy candidates is the purview of voters, not elected officials, prosecutors, juries, or judges. But they don’t really “forget” this fact. In their anti-Trump mania, they just choose to skip this part from Civics 101. 

Indeed, on some level, Trump’s adversaries must recognize that their campaign against Trump is recklessly, egregiously, appallingly undemocratic. Just imagine the media narrative if a Republican president was in the White House and, under his direction or merely under his watch, his leading Democratic opponent was being prosecuted and, state by state, shoved off the ballot. Yet, if challenged on such grounds, the anti-Trump elite would undoubtedly mount the same defense as our COVID-19-era rulers: They would promise that it is only just this one presidential election, presumably the last one for which Trump will run, in which your ability to vote for the candidate of your choice at the ballot box will be compromised or curtailed. Those who would believe this implicit promise are as foolish as those who bought into the fiction that COVID-19 shutdowns would last for a mere two weeks, just enough time to “slow the spread.” 

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“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard,” wrote H.L. Mencken, and if what the people want is a second Trump administration, they deserve to get that, too. He is indisputably the preferred Republican candidate, and understandably so. Anyone who attests to a belief in the will of the people, as do Trump’s opponents when they speak, endlessly, of his alleged threat to democracy, must cope with that reality. 

The judicial and political forces that have gathered to prevent people from exercising their right to vote for Trump lead me to conclude that it is long past time to revise Reagan’s famous joke about government overreach. Forget bureaucracy and red tape. Today, the most terrifying words in the English language are surely: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to do your voting for you.”  

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.