The lede sentence in Jeffrey Rosen’s The Wall Street Journal weekend essay is typical of media anti-Trump disinformation, indicating that WSJ is now galloping in full stride with the herd. According to Rosen, “The allegations in the indictment of Donald Trump for conspiring to overturn the election of 2020 represent the American Founders’ nightmare.”

The former president—Mr. Trump’s formal status, as Rosen might have reminded readers—did no such thing. President Trump expressed his concern, even amazement, that the 2020 presidential election procedures were changed from past practice, including mass dumps of ballots by mail. Conrad Black pointed out in The New York Sun on July 24th:

Voting and vote counting rules were fundamentally changed especially in a number of swing states and the process of change was not enacted as the Constitution requires, by vote of the state legislatures. This is the cold Trump-hate terror that dare not speak its name: the election may indeed have been stolen.

Rosen cites a “key concern of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton”—two of the three authors of The Federalist Papers (the third being John Jay)—that mobs would be incited by demagogues “to defy the rule of law, and undermine American democracy.”  He then quotes this 1790 observation from Hamilton:

The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw their affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.

Rosen continued this Hamilton observation, as applying to “a man unprincipled in private” to cause a popular storm and “direct the whirlwind.” (Now who possibly could Rosen, today, have in mind?)

Rosen mentions Hamilton by name; so why not quote, however, Hamilton in Federalist Paper, No. 1, which carries much the same message as the 1790 comment? Properly interpreted for present purpose however, No. 1, alludes to a threat of someone like Joe Biden—not the threat of Trump.

The bulk of Rosen’s essay is a pastiche of random events in American history, notably a summary of the acquittal of Aaron Burr in his early 19th century treason trial. That trial was presided over by United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. Rosen does not present his view of what Marshall would have assuredly thought of the Biden/Garland use of the Justice Department to wage political war by indictment.

Rosen throws in a passing reference to Federalist Paper No. 10—without mentioning the source—but fails to include the implicit rebuke to what I would call Bidenism, or the regime’s assault on free speech. (Compare Madison’s argument in No. 10 on the need for liberty in politics, to the repressive practices of Biden, most notably censoring conservative views.)

But of the Founders anticipating “the threat” of Trump, nothing to the eye of this observer.

Now let’s go to the Federalist Papers Nos. 1 and 10 and their implicit warnings against the threat of Biden.

In No. 1, Hamilton noted:

…a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.

Now who is zealous “for the firmness and efficiency of government”—Biden or Trump? The answer is obvious: MAGAman.

Hamilton continued:

History will teach us that the former [“specious” concern] has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter [authentic but “forbidden” zeal], and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.

Hamilton gave us the idea of Joe Biden around 236 years before he arrived on the American scene.

Rosen sees the Jan 6. indictment as an accusation that President Trump tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Perhaps Hamilton, in Federalist Paper No. 1, would instead see such a “specious” charge as placing the country on the road to despotism.

The truth is, Donald J. Trump is the champion of the people; he is neither a demagogue nor a despot. Those who rail against him, spew lies in specious impeachment cover-ups of Biden. The former president does not pose the threat to liberty in America. Why, indeed, is he willing to be a target for abuse, often standing alone, if he was not committed by love of country to improve the lives of the disheartened, distressed, and disdained?

No. 10 discusses how factions in the U.S. are made possible through liberty—a term probably abhorrent to the extreme left. No. 10, however, doesn’t shrink from declaring the leading cause of faction as “the various and unequal distribution of property”; creating creditor classes, debtor classes, and landed, mercantile, and manufacturing interests. All contending and cooperating in liberty, the context, arguably, reflected by these four letters: MAGA. Factions thrive where there is liberty in political life, and as Madison noted, “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, and aliment without which it instantly expires.”

Yet, what Bidenism is all about is the annihilation of debate as destructive to the preferred political life ruled by the infallible elite. How can there be liberty when full, free, frank debate is stifled by one word: disinformation?

Madison notes that, “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” Who else but Biden and company is a threat to the emergence of “different opinions”?

And so, another reason for the radical left to rewrite American history, traditions, and culture.  They claim infallibility for their policy papers on, for example, Covid -19, climate change, Trump-as-a-threat-to-democracy, etc. There is a word for such claims, and that word is “disinformation.”

Image: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.