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VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Who Are The Real Kings?
Victor Davis Hanson
Contributor
October 24, 2025 10:06 AM ET
So-called King, Donald Trump, ran in two contested Republican primaries.
He ran three times in a general election.
He was elected twice, and his party recently won a Republican Congress.
In contrast, in 2020, former President Joe Biden did not run a typical campaign.
He avoided the public, staying ensconced in his basement. He outsourced his campaign to Democratic politicos, donors, and a sycophantic media.
No red state ever sought to remove Biden or former Vice President Kamala Harris from their 2024 ballots. In contrast, 25 blue states attempted to take Trump off their ballots.
In 2021, Biden’s DOJ and FBI raided then-former-President Trump’s home. They found only 102 classified documents among some 14,000 seized, but nevertheless indicted him.
There was no such SWAT raid on Biden’s multiple repositories of illegally removed classified documents. (RELATED: No Kings Day Was A Total Cringefest)
All were in less secure places than at Mar-a-Lago. Biden removed them over the course of three decades with impunity. At the time, unlike Trump, he had no presidential prerogatives to declassify them.
Special counsel Robert Hur found Biden culpable for the removal of these files but declined to prosecute, claiming that he was too enfeebled to stand trial.
In 2024, the same backroom donors and politicos who had conspired to ensure Biden was the 2020 nominee now, against his wishes, in coup-like fashion, removed him from his own reelection ticket.
Within 48 hours and without a delegate vote, they crowned Harris as the presumed nominee. Queen Harris had not received a single delegate vote in her disastrous 2020 primary run.
Trump, in 2020, did not sic his Department of Justice on his rival, Biden.
Nor during his presidency did his Department of Justice indict any past or future political opponent or ex-president.
In contrast, Kingly Biden’s White House helped coordinate 91 indictments of his past and future presidential rival, ex-president Trump.
A mere three days after Trump announced his reelection bid on November 15, 2022, Jack Smith was coincidentally appointed special prosecutor of Trump.
That same day, strangely, Nathan Wade, the Georgia county prosecutor prosecuting Trump, met with Biden’s White House counsel.
US Senator Josh Hawley, Republican from Missouri, speaks about the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation, a precursor to former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe into efforts to overturn the 2020 US election results, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with US Attorney General Pam Bondi on oversight of the Department of Justice, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, October 7, 2025. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
On the same day, Matthew Colangelo, the former lead prosecutor in Letitia James’s case against Trump, abruptly left his DOJ post. He would soon go on to lead Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump.
In the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s surrogates rounded up 51 “intelligence authorities” to lie that Hunter Biden’s authentic and incriminating laptop — then verified but suppressed by the FBI — was the work of the Russians.
The Biden-era FBI also joined Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to help smother any media story that might have verified the authenticity of the laptop.
The left portrays Trump’s constitutional right to pardon as the act of a king.
In his nearly five years of governance, Trump has pardoned roughly 1,700, including about 1,500 en masse for those convicted for the January 6 protests.
That number so far is about 200 fewer pardons than during the Obama administration.
Biden, in a mere four years in office, pardoned roughly 4,245 people — the vast majority through autopen signatures and without the full knowledge of Biden himself.
Under the Obama and Biden administrations, admitted left-wing government lawbreakers and White House allies were never prosecuted for felonious behavior. (RELATED: Here’s How James Comey Hopes To Stop His Case From Going To Trial)
CIA head John Brennan admitted to lying twice to Congress.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confessed to lying under oath to Congress as well.
FBI Director James Comey claimed ignorance or amnesia 245 times while under oath to a House oversight committee.
Interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe lied four times, often while under oath to government investigators.
A federal judge in 2020 admonished John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor and vehement critic, that he had endangered national security by removing sensitive documents to write an anti-Trump campaign-cycle memoir.
He also warned Bolton that he could be subject to civil and criminal penalties.
Not one of these political grandees was ever indicted by either the Obama or Biden DOJ.
Trump’s White House advisors Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were arrested in public for ignoring a congressional subpoena, convicted, and imprisoned.
In contrast, top Democrat officials like former attorneys general Eric Holder and Merrick Garland both ignored congressional subpoenas and faced no such indictments.
Monarchs might order assassinations of U.S. citizens abroad and surveil the phone records of Associated Press reporters.
Obama did both during his tenure. (RELATED: FBI Says Jack Smith Monitored Private Calls Of Nearly A Dozen GOP Senators During Jan. 6 Probe)
Do kings monitor the phone records of their senatorial opponents?
Biden’s special counsel, Jack Smith, did just that.
Why then do the Democrats’ “No Kings” protests claim that Trump is a monarch?
Answer: Through open and fair elections, the left lost most of its former political power in Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court.
Now in their fury and impotence, Democrats hit the streets — projecting onto their hated nemesis, Trump, their own past preferences for kingly methods.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books.
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From Daily Caller
Link:
https://dailycaller.com/2025/10/24/v...he-real-kings/
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