This is a bit awkward. When Donald Trump won the election in 2016, the Washington Post switched its motto to “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It was very clear what they meant by this: Donald Trump is destroying democracy, and we, the Washington Post, will shine a light on Trump’s misdeeds in order to save democracy.

Fair enough. Everyone knows the Washington Post is liberal, and it’s the job of the press to hold the powerful to account.

Then in 2022 the Washington Post set up a “Democracy Team” because we live in a “precarious moment when democracy itself seems under assault.”

And this summer, when the Washington Post sent out a poll to the key swing states on Trump and Biden, they asked “Which candidate do you think would do a better job handling … threats to democracy in the U.S.?”

Trump dominated on this question.

Here are the highlights from the Washington Post’s report:

“President Biden and his Democratic allies have cast his reelection campaign as a battle for the country’s survival, warning that a second Donald Trump presidency would present an existential threat to American democracy….

“In six swing states that Biden narrowly won in 2020, a little more than half of voters classified as likely to decide the presidential election say threats to democracy are extremely important to their vote for president, according to a poll by The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.

“Yet, more of them trust Trump to handle those threats than Biden….”

Trump was trusted on “handling threats to democracy in the U.S.” by 44% of voters compared to 33% for Biden.

Why would that be?

I have some guesses. I think normal people don’t see “threats to democracy” the same way the news media does.

For instance, members of the Washington Post’s Democracy Team seemed to think that overturning Roe v. Wade was a bad thing. That’s a normal opinion, but overturning Roe was, objectively, a pro-democracy opinion — it restored abortion to the realm of democracy.

Biden has declared all “MAGA Republicans” a threat to democracy, which suggests that his definition of democracy is simply “people I like get to win.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Biden’s agenda includes expanding executive authority at the expense of Congress, which is not a pro-democracy agenda. And “trust the science,” one of Biden’s self-conceits, means “hand power to unelected bureaucrats to control our lives.”

So while the news media’s definition of “defending democracy” means “defeating Trump,” most of the public doesn’t see it that way.