Joe Biden Was the Real ‘King,’ Not Trump

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve been witnessing, supposedly, millions of people nationwide have hit the streets under the banner of “No Kings.”

I guess that means that President Donald Trump is a monarch, a hereditary leader of some sort. But who really are the kings and who are not the kings? And we could go through some definitions of “monarch” and see to whom it applies the best.

Kings don’t have elections. They are just appointed by birth or a privy council, I don’t know, some kind of insider appoints this person or that person, if there’s not a royal heir in succession. Or that might apply to an autocrat, is true.

Donald Trump ran for election three times. He won twice. The last time he won the popular vote, the Electoral College, he won all of his swing states. First Republican to win the popular vote since 2004. He had 70/30, 60/40 majorities on all of the issues.

Joe Biden, in 2020, had lost the first three caucuses or primaries. He was going nowhere. And then a group of insiders, politicos, donors, the media panicked because they knew that to nominate a Elizabeth Warren, a Pete Buttigieg, especially a Bernie Sanders, would destroy the Democratic ticket.

So, they cooked up this idea that Joe Biden from Scranton—even though they knew he was already cognitively challenged—could be a veneer, a wax effigy. And then they did not allow him to campaign because we know what happens when he campaigns, as we saw in 2024.

He sat in the basement under the pretext of COVID-19. He outsourced his campaign like a royal monarch to his underlings in the media. They got him elected. And then he, more or less, abdicated while on the job and let the hard Left, in this quid pro quo arrangement, run the country. I should say, run the country into the ground by opening the border, 10 million to 12 million illegal aliens, a 9% inflation rate, humiliation in Afghanistan, etc., etc.

Donald Trump began, went transparently and openly out to the voters to be elected.

We also know that monarchs conduct lawfare. That is, they use their judges to go after political enemies. Donald Trump never went after his opponent, Hillary Clinton, even though she had a lot of criminal exposure with her email scandal.

He never went after former President Barack Obama. No FBI raided the Obama home to look for classified documents, even though he had a well-publicized disagreement with the federal archivist about which documents he should take or hold. He never went after him.

He never went after Joe Biden. He hasn’t gone after Joe Biden today.

In contrast, Donald Trump had 91 indictments filed by federal, local, and state prosecutors in cahoots.

We know that on Nov. 15, when he announced his campaign, a mere three days later, Jack Smith, a federal prosecutor, went after him on the Mar-a-Lago raid and also on Jan. 6.

We know that that same day that Smith was appointed, suddenly, Nathan Wade from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ Georgia prosecution turned up talking to the Biden White House counsel. We know that same day, the third-ranking Justice Department attorney left, he came from New York Attorney General Letitia James’ prosecution of Trump, but he’d left that day, resigned from his prestigious position to go to work for whom? Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

That’s what monarchs do.

We know that monarchs also snoop. They go after their enemies with, you know, espionage. That’s sort of like Barack Obama. He surveilled the phone records of AP journalists. His CIA director surveilled and lied about it—John Brennan—the staff computers of senators.

We know that Joe Biden’s special counsel, Jack Smith, spied on eight senators’ phone records. He had the data of all of their phones—how long they talked to someone, when it was, to whom they did.

Donald Trump hasn’t done that. He hasn’t gotten 51 intelligence authorities to lie that a laptop was authentic. He didn’t order the FBI to work with Facebook or the old Twitter to suppress the news. That’s what the Biden administration did.

So, what is this “No Kings” about? They should be talking about the Obama and Biden administration. Kings ignore subpoenas. They just say, “The law doesn’t apply to me.” So, that’s what Eric Holder, the attorney general and so-called wingman of the Obama administration, did.

He got a subpoena to talk to Congress and bring evidence about the Fast and Furious scandal. And what did he do? He said: I’m not going to obey a congressional subpoena.

Attorney General Merrick Garland got one to come in and testify. He said: I don’t obey congressional subpoenas.

Two high-ranking Trump supporters—not Cabinet members, but advisers in the White House for a long time, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, got congressional subpoenas about Jan. 6. And they said: This is overtly political. I’m not going to show up—in Eric Holder style or Merrick Garland style. And what happened to them? They were arrested, they were indicted, they were convicted, and they were imprisoned. That’s what kings do.

Kings don’t obey parliaments, to the extent they have them. If they disagree with something, they shut them down. They just cease to exist.

As we’re speaking, the government is shut down. And why is it shut down? Because the Democrats lost the 2024 election. They have no power in the House and they have no power in the Senate. All they have is a minority filibuster, veto on the Senate. And they decided, because they did not get their way, to shut down the entire federal government. It wasn’t Donald Trump that shut it down. It was the kingly act of the Left.

And finally, monarchs nullify existing law when they don’t like it. They just say, “You know what? I’m not gonna follow it.”

Donald Trump has been the subject of ridiculous lower district federal judge ritz. The whole purpose of them is to delay and hamper his executive orders.

Everybody knows that the orders are legal, that they are either overturned at the next circuit court appellate level or by the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, these left-wing federal judges become iconic by stopping Donald Trump. Does he obey them? Yes. Does California Gov. Newsom or Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, or Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago, or Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass—do they obey federal law? No. In kingly, queenly fashion, they said: Federal law does not apply to us on matters of immigration. We will oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We will not cooperate with ICE.

In the case of Mayor Johnson, we will not have law enforcement come to their aid when they’re in danger. In the case of Portland, if thugs are attacking ICE and they wanna protect themselves and arrest these people, then they flee to the other side of the street and hide behind local police.

In other words, in neo-Confederate style, the Left, maybe like kings, are nullifying federal law. They say that Article VI of the Constitution that specifies the enforcement of federal law by federal enforcement shall take authority over, shall enjoy authority over state, local, and county laws in matters of federal jurisdiction.

In other words, if you have a federal law about immigration and you want to get a criminal or someone who’s facing a deportation order, it doesn’t matter what the city of Los Angeles or the county of Los Angeles or the state of California say. A federal law enforcement officer has the right to arrest somebody, if it’s legal and he’s in violation of either immigration law or federal codes. And they are. And yet, in nullification, neo-Confederate fashion, that law is being nullified, ignored, violated.

In other words, if you’re gonna have a “No Kings” protest and argue that the current president is a monarch, a king, a dictator, an autocrat, then you better come with evidence.

But presidents hold elections. They stand for reelection. They follow federal law. They follow court orders. They don’t snoop on people. They follow congressional subpoenas. And they don’t conduct lawfare.

For those on the left who are worried about kings taking over the country or violating our freedom, look in the mirror.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Joe Biden Was the Real ‘King,’ Not Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.