OPINION:
Democrats have long deluded themselves into believing they are many things that, in fact, they are not.
One of those delusions was born on July 25, 2016, when first lady Michelle Obama claimed, without evidence, that Democrats always take the high road, compared with Republicans.
“When they go low,” she hilariously said at the Democratic National Convention, “we go high.”
Of course, that has never been so, and wasn’t even true of her husband.
In his first presidential campaign, a Barack Obama ad said Republican challenger John McCain was so out of touch that he couldn’t send email. The ad failed to mention that this was because his Vietnam War injuries made using a keyboard painful.
That’s not “going high.”
Neither was it inspiring when Mr. Obama’s running mate and vice president, the formerly sentient Joseph R. Biden, bellowed at Black voters in 2012 that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”
Nevertheless, the myth that Democrats always stay above the fray persists. Even the supposedly dispassionate data analyst Nate Silver parroted the “We go high” nonsense just a few days ago. On X, he declared this strategy (which everyone knows has never been employed) to be “a tactical failure for Democrats,” as if they’re currently using it.
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin knows a good fable when he sees one because he is also still spreading the “go high” garbage.
“I’m sick and tired of this Democratic Party bringing a pencil to a knife fight,” he said at the DNC summer meeting this week. “We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore.”
That’s not who they’ve ever been, and the emergence of President Trump should have dispelled that falsehood for good.
They spied on his 2016 campaign and laid the groundwork to undermine any potential administration.
When Mr. Trump won, Democrats never accepted his White House victory as legitimate and focused on removing him from office by any means.
Indeed, at 12:19 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2017 — 19 minutes into the first Trump administration — The Washington Post ran a story with the headline “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.”
By the end of that first term, Democrats had done it twice.
The lie that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia consumed the first three years of that administration. It was fiction created by ridiculously fraudulent opposition research, and the “high road” in that sordid story led straight to the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which sanctioned and funded the lies.
So, Democrats should cool it with the “we go high” talk unless they are speaking of the lengths they went to try to send Mr. Trump to jail. They were certainly aiming high there, with sham charges in state and federal courts and the unprecedented use of the Justice Department to try to incarcerate the opposing candidate.
They tried to bankrupt Mr. Trump and conjured up an outrageous civil verdict in New York of over half a billion dollars, including interest, but an appeals court has tossed out the penalty.
In some cases, “Democrats taking the high road” has meant trying to get Mr. Trump thrown off the ballot. In Maine, the secretary of state ruled him ineligible for the 2024 primary. In Colorado, the state Supreme Court disqualified him. In Illinois, a judge ordered him off the ballot. These efforts to erase Mr. Trump were thwarted by the U.S. Supreme Court, which said states couldn’t make those determinations.
Democrats in many places — including Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, New Jersey, New York, Virginia and Wyoming — had tried.
Don’t forget 10 years of an endless stream of personal attacks on Mr. Trump, with Democrats and media figures likening him to the worst monsters in world history. After all that, two maniacs took the rhetoric to heart and tried to kill him.
It goes on and on.
They blamed Mr. Trump personally for every death that resulted from a pandemic that began in China.
They lied about Georgia’s newly enacted election law in 2021, calling it “Jim Crow 2.0,” and said it cost the city of Atlanta the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
They conspired with Big Tech to silence Republicans, including Mr. Trump, on social media.
They lied to the entire world about President Biden’s mental decline and then forced him out of his reelection campaign when the deceit became unsustainable.
They jammed in Kamala Harris as a replacement without primaries and then hid her for 40 days. After she got crushed, they said she lost because the racist and sexist election was too short.
There’s not one high road there.
Democrats lie to themselves to feel better, and they must know this.
They didn’t lose to Mr. Trump because they played by the rules. They broke every rule there is and still lost.
That’s no delusion.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and founder of Line Drive Public Affairs. He served as a senior adviser on the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director on the 2020 Trump campaign.
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