Projection.
In the Wall Street Journal this morning, WSJ editorial board member Allysia Finley tackles exactly what is going on with attacks on former President Trump. The headline: https://www.wsj.com/articles/
Trump as Dictator Is a Classic Case of Projection
Biden and his supporters try to excuse and deflect attention from their own authoritarian actions.
Finley writes:
“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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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, candlesticks—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 Mr. 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.
President Biden and his supporters project their own authoritarian impulses onto Mr. 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, Mr. 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.
Mr. 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 Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Board and Justice Department—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 Department special counsel has filed trumped-up charges against Mr. 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. Mr. Biden and his allies have done exactly what they warn Mr. Trump will do if he returns to the White House. Unlike Mr. Biden, however, Mr. 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.”
In short, Ms. Finley has nailed the problem exactly. The American Left is exactly accusing the former President of what they themselves – in this case specifically President Biden – are doing. Her list of examples of just how they do this is spot on. It is exactly “projection.”
