The cognitive dissonance of the Democrats

Believe it or not, I planned to write the gist of this column before Saturday night. However, a caveat. Unlike the newly christened Republican VP pick, J.D. Vance, I don’t directly blame hyperventilating Democratic rhetoric for last weekend’s attempt on Trump’s life. Responsibility rests with the would-be assassin.

Nevertheless, the party’s off-the-charts argumentation has rankled me for the past year. From the get-go, Biden has framed his campaign as a defence of ‘our democracy’, echoing Britons’ sacred obligation to lock themselves in their cupboards to save ‘our NHS’. For Democrats, what’s at stake in this election is nothing less than the perpetuation of America’s form of government. Donald Trump’s threat is ‘existential’. Trump will revoke the Constitution. Re-elected, he’ll crown himself president for life.

Biden supporters in the media, in the days when Biden had supporters in the media, have snatched snippets of Trump blather out of context, as the president did in his unreassuring (‘Look…! Look…!’) Monday night NBC interview. Trump asserted he wouldn’t be dictator ‘except on day one’, when he’d ‘close the border’ and ‘drill, drill, drill!’ This was clearly tongue-in-cheek posturing to taunt his critics. But Dems took the bait, claiming ever since: ‘See! He’ll be a dictator! He even said so!’ In kind, Biden again cited Trump’s threat of a ‘bloodbath’ should he lose, conveniently overlooking the fact that Trump was referring to the grim fate of the American auto industry in any second Biden term.

Who’s commonly the king of hyperbole? Trump himself, who compulsively resorts to superlative and exaggeration. A proportion of the ‘lies’ that Trump told in last month’s debate were fact-checked as untrue because the guy can’t help but couch any statement in terms of the ‘best’, the ‘greatest’ and ‘most wonderful’ or the ‘worst’ and ‘most horrible’.