From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Trump as Dictator Is a Classic Case of Projection   
   By Allysia Finley, Dec. 10, 2023, Wall Street Journal   
   If you haven’t heard, Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are planning a   
   coup.    
   “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” Robert Kagan, an editor   
   at    
   large at the Washington Post, writes in a recent 6,000-word essay that   
   compares    
   America’s fractious democracy with Weimar Germany.   
      
   Budding opinion writers are instructed not to draw inapt comparisons to   
   Hitler,    
   yet Trump’s opponents are casting aside such conventions in much the same   
   way    
   they’re jettisoning political and legal ones. Only by convincing themselves    
   that Trump threatens the existence of the republic can they justify their own    
   weaponization of government to stop him. “When a marauder is crashing   
   through    
   your house, you throw everything you can at him—pots, pans, ca   
   dlesticks—in the    
   hope of slowing him down and tripping him up,” Mr. Kagan writes.   
      
   Cynicism is one way to explain the left’s hysteria. Another is that the   
   portrayal    
   of Trump as a would-be dictator is a textbook case of psychological   
   projection,    
   the process by which people avoid confronting their own unwanted thoughts,   
   feelings    
   or behaviors by subconsciously ascribing them to others. Psychologists refer   
   to    
   this as a defense mechanism.   
      
   Biden and his supporters project their own authoritarian impulses onto Trump    
   because they don’t want to come to terms with their own illiberalism. The    
   examples in the Biden presidency are rife.   
      
   With the stroke of a pen, Biden tried to cancel half a trillion dollars in    
   student debt, ban evictions and mandate Covid vaccines—each of which the    
   Supreme Court blocked because Congress never gave the president the authority    
   to do so. Even after losing at the high court, his administration has used    
   other regulatory means to write off about $770 billion in student debt.   
      
   Biden has abused his authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act to wall off   
   nearly   
   1.5 million acres of land from fossil-fuel development. He’s reconstructed   
   the    
   Clean Air Act to shut down coal and gas power plants and ban gasoline-powered   
   cars.    
   And he has ignored Congress’s command to lease federal land for oil and gas   
   drilling    
   and dallied on holding auctions even after being ordered by a federal court to   
   do so.   
      
   His administration has failed to enforce the nation’s immigration laws,   
   paroling    
   millions of migrants into the U.S. rather than detaining them at the border or    
   holding them in Mexico while they await hearings. The immigration-court   
   backlog    
   has doubled to two million since 2019 amid a surge of migrants exploiting lax   
   law    
   enforcement.   
      
   The top brass has threatened social-media companies with retribution,   
   including    
   antitrust lawsuits, if they don’t censor speech that progressives dislike.   
   The    
   Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in September ruled that Biden officials   
   had    
   violated the First Amendment by colluding with tech platfoms to squelch   
   politically    
   disfavored speech about Covid and elections.   
      
   A phalanx of regulators—the FTC, SEC, NLRB and Justice Dept—has targeted   
   Elon Musk’s    
   companies for sundry regulatory infractions after the tech entrepreneur   
   criticized    
   Democrats’ leftward lurch and recommended Americans vote for Republicans in   
   the 2022    
   midterms.   
      
   Meantime, a Justice Dept special counsel has filed trumped-up charges against   
   Trump    
   for allegedly defrauding the U.S. Progressive prosecutors in Georgia and New   
   York have    
   piled on. New York Attorney General Letitia James even campaigned for office   
   in 2018    
   on a pledge to nail the sitting president.   
      
   Abuse executive power. Ignore the law. Run roughshod over individual   
   liberties.    
   Retaliate against political opponents. Biden and his allies have done exactly   
   what    
   they warn Trump will do if he returns to the White House. Unlike Biden,   
   however,    
   Trump would have to contend with a hostile media and federal bureaucracy that   
   would    
   be throwing pots, pans and candlesticks at him at every step.   
      
   The left’s depictions of Trump as a tyrant are likely to fall on deaf ears   
   with    
   GOP voters who have heard leftists say the same for years, and not only about   
   Trump.   
   “Bush the despot” headlined a piece by former Bill Clinton aide Sidney   
   Blumenthal in    
   2005. “In a single coup, he planned to take over all the institutions of   
   government.    
   By crushing the traditions of the Senate he would pack the courts, especially   
   the    
   Supreme Court, with lock-step ideologues,” Blumenthal wrote. Isn’t that   
   what leftists    
   have been exhorting Biden to do?   
      
   Some conservatives engage in projection too. Consider Vivek Ramaswamy’s   
   questioning    
   of Nikki Haley’s authenticity during last week’s debate even as he   
   pandered to Trump    
   voters. Trump derides his former allies as disloyal even though he turned on   
   them    
   because he couldn’t abide their dissent or criticism.   
      
   What Trump and his opponents have most in common is their determination to   
   blame    
   others for their own failings.   
      
   https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-as-dictator-is-a-classic-case   
   of-projection-2024-election-biden-robert-kagan-a4bc86c7   
      
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