Victor Davis Hanson

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.)

Sherry Robinson
All She Wrote

Back in September, the governor announced that on Nov. 1 New Mexico would become the first state to offer universal child care. We made national headlines. It would be a huge benefit to working families and employers, of course, but legislative budget makers are starting to ask hard questions about costs. And they should.

This is when I like to remind readers that I’m not Hard Hearted Hannah. When I was a single mom on reporter wages, day care took such a big bite out of my paycheck that I had almost nothing left after rent and groceries. I didn’t resent the day care providers because I knew they were just trying to survive.

So I’ve been down that road and see the need, but I have a few problems with the idea.

Under this program, the state will offer free child care to everyone, no matter how much they make. It will save families an average of $12,000 a year per child. What we’ve had since 2021 is a cap of 400% of the federal poverty level, or about $120,000 a year for a family of four.

New Mexico has nowhere near the capacity to add the predicted 12,000 babies and toddlers to a program that now serves 27,000 kids. Typically there are three applications for every opening, and some areas are day-care deserts. But under the new program local governments and schools can apply for low-interest loans to expand or create new facilities. Elizabeth Groginsky, secretary of the Early Childhood Education and Care Department (ECECD), projects 55 new child care centers and 1,000 new in-home providers.

Child-care workers will make more money (we hope). Reimbursement rates to providers, according to the state’s news release, “will rise to reflect the true cost of care. Programs that commit to paying entry-level staff a minimum of $18 per hour and offer 10 hours of care per day, five days a week, will receive an incentive rate.” Groginsky expects better pay to help recruit the additional 5,000 early childhood professionals that will be needed.

The governor intends to pay for all this from the Early Childhood Education Trust Fund. Created by a Constitutional Amendment in 2022, it’s ballooned from $300 million to $10 billion. (Thank you, oil and gas industry.) In addition, legislators increased the department’s budget by $113 million to $995 million; of that, $463 million is for child care.

Notice that the governor didn’t ask lawmakers for their blessings before launching the new program, but she’s counting on their support. And the ask just increased. The department raised reimbursement rates following feedback from day-care providers, which bumped up its funding request for the next legislative session from $120 million to $156 million, reported the Albuquerque Journal.

Rep. Nathan Small, chair of the House Appropriations and Finance Committee, said the ECECD budget will get close scrutiny.

Sen. George Muñoz, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, has a problem with the agencies’ approach to funding. “They announce initiatives but don’t know how to pay for them and leave it up to us,” he told me. “They make the Legislature the bad guy.”

When I spoke to Rep. Patty Lundstrom recently, she brought up universal child care and asked, “How are we supposed to budget for that?” As co-chair of the legislative Federal Funding Stabilization Subcommittee, she was astounded that the governor would kick off universal child care or any other new program at a time when the state faces daunting demands due to federal funding cuts.

As I write this, the state is scrambling to protect 450,000 New Mexicans who will lose SNAP (food stamp) benefits. Because of the federal government shutdown, states are out of money, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has refused to use its reserves to extend aid.

I agree with these legislators who know they’re in for a difficult session and a lot of tough decisions. I also question why I as a taxpayer should subsidize the day care of people making more money than I do.

What we see here is a governor heading into her final year as the state’s chief executive. She has her legacy in mind. Universal child care would be a dandy legacy during normal times. These are not normal times.

Sherry Robinson is a longtime New Mexico reporter and editor. She has worked in Grants, Gallup, the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Business Weekly and Albuquerque Tribune. She is the author of four books. Her columns won first place in 2024 from New Mexico Press Women.