During the nine tumultuous years that Donald Trump has sought, contemplated seeking, or actually occupied the office of president, his adversaries have ominously and incessantly warned his followers that they are making a deal with the devil. Trump may promise that he will implement this or that policy, but, his opponents allege, he is too transactional, too mercurial, and too self-centered to be counted on. In their eagerness to be associated with Trump, his supporters will inevitably compromise their principles — or so the thinking goes.

To be sure, this sort of argument against Trump is not altogether without merit. After once presenting himself as a relatively vocal supporter of the pro-life movement, and seeming to confirm the sincerity of that support by nominating Supreme Court justices who ushered in the glorious collapse of Roe v. Wade, Trump has more recently adopted a dithering, wavering, hemming-and-hawing tone on abortion and offered genuine compromises on abortion policy. For example, in expressing his satisfaction with life issues being settled by the states, Trump is implicitly but undeniably washing his hands to the pro-life agenda — as though abortions sanctioned at the state level are somehow less of a moral outrage than those permitted by the Supreme Court. 

The counterargument to this narrative is that no politician is immune to charges of hypocrisy, posturing, and expediency and that voters understand the concessions they are making when they select what used to be called a lesser of two evils. It’s likely that most Trump voters fully grasp that his commitment to the pro-life cause is not as intuitive or fervent as his belief in tariffs. Nonetheless, they conclude that even a murkily pro-life president is superior to a full-throated abortion-endorsing president. This is less an example of a Faustian bargain than an illustration of electoral politics in a two-party system, sadly. 

In heaven, we will not have to make such trade-offs, but as we have seen, life on earth in 2024 is not heaven. And Trump followers are not the only ones who have accommodated ideas allegedly anathema to them in furtherance of a greater good. After all, it was just one debate ago that the Democratic nominee for president boasted of the endorsement of none other than Dick Cheney. 

“I actually have the endorsement of 200 Republicans who have formerly worked with President Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain, including the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney and Congressmember Liz Cheney,” said Vice President Kamala Harris, offering a list of right-wing supporters who might have appealed to the Republican base around the time of Season One of The Office and whose historically conservative positions would have rendered them abhorrent to most Democrats until about 10 minutes ago. (To his credit, Trump, viewed in perpetual split-screen during the debate, shook his head and smiled broadly at the mention of Liz Cheney — perhaps the high point of the debate, in part because it involved no talking. It only would have been better if he had rolled his eyes.)

In fact, Harris’s incredible display of fealty toward an older, grayer, and increasingly unpopular iteration of the Republican Party is just the latest example of the progressive Left compromising, finessing, or flat-out selling out its own values in the name of its decadelong fixation with terminating the Trump era in American political life.

It may seem like a century ago, but just seven weeks prior to the Trump-Harris debate, President Joe Biden left the presidential race. Perhaps the much-delayed departure of the tired-out 81-year-old commander in chief should be greeted with some measure of bipartisan relief, but the method by which he was induced to leave matters: Biden’s withdrawal did not reflect a groundswell of discontent from Democratic voters who, during the primaries and caucuses, supported him to an overwhelming degree. (Just ask Jason Palmer or Dean Phillips.) No, it was Nancy Pelosi, George Clooney, and the legacy media that managed Biden’s retirement and Harris’s elevation. Maybe this is just realpolitik, but since the Democratic Party presents itself as the caretaker of democracy, we must acknowledge the wisdom of those who point out the undemocratic means by which Biden was pulled from the stage.

Democrats would counter that all other values must be set aside for the primary goal of beating Trump, including arriving at the best candidate by manner of a pressure campaign rather than an electoral process. Yet this conviction, too, reflects the fatal contradiction of their position: The Democrats contend that Trump is a threat to democracy, so by their logic, democracy must be regarded as a threat, too — since its free exercise, by way of Biden remaining the choice of actual primary and caucus voters, might have resulted in, well, Trump’s democratic election in November. Stated simply, Trump voters who hold conservative views on social issues but tolerate Trump’s equivocations are infinitely less hypocritical than Democratic voters who insist on their love for democracy but embrace their party’s dilution of it.

In their quest to vanquish Trump, the Democrats have entered the realm of psychological projection — namely, the attribution of their own motives or objectives to Trump. How else to explain the breathless manner in which the media organizations say that Trump has “step[ped] up threats to imprison those he sees as foes” (a recent headline in the New York Times) or “threaten[ed] to jail adversaries” (another recent headline from the Associated Press) in willful ignorance of the fact that the current criminal cases against Trump would, if successful, possibly result in his own imprisonment? Yes, these cases have been brought by district attorneys and a special counsel, but ask yourself: If Trump was president and his Democratic challenger was being brought before various judges on legally specious charges, would anyone plausibly see daylight between Trump and the district attorneys and special counsel? In other words, Trump is accused of advocating the very weaponization of the criminal justice system of which he himself is the subject — not hypothetically, but for real.

And, with a straight face, the legacy media have reacted to Trump’s life twice being imperiled by would-be assassins not by contemplating the effect of their own insanely over-the-top characterizations of him but instead by insisting that his own words somehow set the conditions for these events. This is how myopic the Left and its allies have become: They cannot fathom or even entertain the far more obvious reality that what needs to be dialed back is their own extremist rhetoric, not Trump’s. After all, Trump does not engage in extremist rhetoric against himself! This is beyond cognitive dissonance. The Democrats’ lack of self-awareness is astonishing. 

Even Harris’s nice-sounding appeals to unity sound like transmissions from Bizarro World. “I believe very strongly that the American people want a president who understands the importance of bringing us together, knowing that we have so much more in common than what separates us,” Harris said during the last debate. Taken at face value, no one could disagree with these words, but implicit in them is the notion that Trump alone is the one standing in the way of this unification. Yet it was Harris’s own administration that has consistently sought to render Trump and his supporters strange and scary, as when, in his notorious 2022 speech in Philadelphia, Biden associated not only Trump but a larger pool of “the MAGA Republicans” with “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” 

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What, then, do the Democrats believe? Do they endorse the aggressive, nation-building foreign policy of Dick Cheney? Do they think that democracy is advanced by nominating their presidential candidates through New York Times editorials by the star of Batman and Robin rather than the primary and caucus process? Do they truly oppose political leaders jailing their rivals? Do they really favor inviting their “extremist” conservative neighbors, with their cringey conservative views, into the party? Or, more plausibly, have they been so focused, for so long, on exiling Trump from the public square that they will say and do things entirely contrary to their actual agenda or alleged principles to advance that cause? They are willing, in this instance alone, to form an alliance with the Cheneys, disregard their own nominating process, pretend to oppose weaponization, and act as though they will play nice with the very Republicans whose policies and ideas they seek consistently to undermine and belittle. 

For the Democrats, Trump has become something like the political equivalent of a red supergiant star. To them, he is a massive stellar presence that bathes their entire world in orangeness. And it is really, really hard to see clearly in orange. Its light blinds the Democrats to their own sins, to the betrayal of their party’s past values and virtues. 

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.