Do Democrats Really Believe What They Say about Trump?

At every opportunity Democrats are hammering the electorate with the claim that Trump is a danger to Democracy and that if he were to return to the White House a fascist dictatorship would be upon us, but do they really believe this?

Charlie Cooke at National Review writes that if they do believe that Trump is a threat to Democracy then they're exceedingly reckless. If they don't believe it then they're exceedingly deceitful.

Why are they reckless? As an Axios piece notes, a lot of Democrats are hoping that Trump is the Republican nominee because they think his candidacy would "energize" and "motivate" their voters and donors and that he'd be the easiest opponent for Biden to beat.

But Cooke points out that this hope is incredibly irresponsible if one truly believes that Trump is a threat to our Democracy.

Here's his argument:

I don’t know how much more plainly I can say it than this: If you believe that Donald Trump represents a unique threat to democracy — as Joe Biden and his team keep saying that they do — then you should not want Donald Trump on the ballot.

There are no exceptions to this rule. If Trump is the nominee, he has a chance of winning. If he is a threat to the republic, he ought not to be in a position from which he has a chance of winning.

The moment — the very moment — that you start muttering about jolts of energy to voters and donors, or about the best contrast to be drawn, or about motivators of Democrats, you have signaled that you don’t actually consider Trump to be the risk that you say you do.

Add into this mix that President Biden’s approval rating is in the low 30s, and the approach becomes even more inexplicable.

It is not the Democrats’ fault that Donald Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee. That honor goes to the party’s primary electorate, which, of its own free will, has made this call.

But it is the Democrats’ fault that so many within their party are asking the public to accept two contradictory messages at the same time. One cannot expect the electorate to believe both that the Republican candidate for president ought to be disqualified from consideration because he is an insurrectionist and that you hope he is the nominee because it helps energize your donors, voters, and volunteers.

That’s not “counterintuitive”; it’s deceitful. How many times, I wonder, does the party expect to play this game and get away with it?

I doubt that many Democrats really believe that Trump is "a threat to Democracy." I suspect that they're simply lying about it because the threat he poses is not to Democracy but to their power.