My latest at PJ Media:
The Leftist media establishment has been in a predictable uproar ever since President Trump tweeted Thursday: “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” But this time it isn’t just the Left: for Steven Calabresi, whose conservativism is established with the impressive credential of having co-founded the Federalist Society, this was the last straw: He took to that bastion of the conservative media, the New York Times, to denounce Trump’s tweet as “fascistic” and claim that it “is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.”
Calabresi was not the only alleged conservative to break with Trump over this. John Bolton tweeted out the link to Calabresi’s Times article. Numerous Republican leaders joined with Democrats to denounce the tweet. Some warned darkly about how Trump posed an imminent threat to democracy and the rule of law. “Donald Trump has cheated his whole life,” his former rival for the Republican nomination, Joe Walsh, tweeted. “Of course he’ll cheat in this election. Heck, he cheated in the last one.” Peter Wehner, who worked for the three Republican presidents before Trump, declared: “I think Republicans will look back on the deal that they made to get Trump and they will rue the day. I think he is doing generational damage not just to the country, but to the Republican Party and to the conservative cause.”
But what exactly did this incipient dictator do? Calabresi thundered: “President Trump needs to be told by every Republican in Congress that he cannot postpone the federal election. Doing so would be illegal, unconstitutional and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.”
But did Trump actually state that he was planning unilaterally to postpone the federal election? He did not. The hysteria and rage that his question has provoked is once again based on a false premise, as it has been so very many times in the past. Trump never stated any intention to delay the election in some way that would be in defiance of U.S. law. He never stated, contrary to widespread claims, that he would not relinquish his office on January 20, 2021 if he lost the election. Yet every bit of the horror and indignation that has ensued has been based on the idea that he did.
There is much more. Read the rest here.