By Ernest Francais

America’s mentally compromised ex-president Joe Biden (of autopen fame) continues to repeat
the Left’s accusation that President Trump is a “threat to democracy.” This is a continuation of
what Biden has said basically since the inception of his now concluded presidency. The
unfounded nature of the threat to democracy warning, however, is readily apparent when
considered by anyone who has successfully completed even elementary civics. It suffers first
from failure to acknowledge exactly what is a democracy. More fundamentally, the criticism is
ill-founded no matter how one defines democracy. Like much of the remainder of the Left’s
critique of Trump, it is pointless clamor.
In a strict sense, democracy is government by the assembly.

In other words, a democracy has no
legislature that decides what government will do. Instead, the assembly of the people serves as
the legislature. In this sense, democracy has a long-established place in the Western tradition.
The classic example of democracy was ancient Athens, in which (according to Merriam Webster)
the “ecclesia” was the political assembly of the citizens that conducted public business. Athens
had no legislative body to enact laws. The executive function in Athens lay with the Boule, a
council of 500 members.

In that context, the level of discourse was elevated. The meeting of the ecclesia provided
Pericles with the forum for his famous speeches. Demosthenes was another prominent orator,
who strove to insure the clarity of his expression by standing and speaking with a mouthful of
pebbles by the seashore, so that he could be heard over the waves.

In America, we have a distant cousin of Athenian democracy in the New England town meetings,
in which those gathered for the meetings will exercise the legislative function. They have been a
feature of local government in New England since shortly after settlers arrived on the shores of
New England in the 17th Century.

While democracy by the assembly brought elevated discourse and is the purest expression of
Lincoln’s famous ideal of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”, the
Founding Fathers knew that democracy in the sense in which it existed in ancient Athens and the
New England town meetings was not possible in a state of any size, let alone in the republic that
they were creating in Philadelphia in 1787. The enactment of laws cannot depend on the
outcome of a national election such as the United States has every four years. It does not allow
the necessary deliberation and legislative refinement that is possible with a body that would be a
microscopic fraction of the entire population.

Instead of a democracy in the narrow sense of the word, the Founding Fathers elected to have a
constitutional republic in which the nation’s leaders would express the will of the people and be
accountable to the people through elections and would be limited by a written constitution. The
United States, then, is NOT a democracy. And as long as the present constitution remains in
effect, it never will be. The criticism that Trump is a “threat to democracy”, therefore, is
ridiculous because there is nothing to threaten. Reduced to its essence, the Left’s criticism of Trump is that he threatens a straw man that has never existed.

What the West inherited from Athenian democracy, however, is not so much the procedure that
every citizen votes on the laws but instead the ideal of “representative” government, which the
Declaration of Independence articulates in its statement that government “deriv[es] its just
powers from the consent of the governed” and what Lincoln would later refer to in his
Gettysburg address as “government of, by, and for the people.” Instead of all the citizens voting
on laws as an assembly, in a representative government they elect representatives who adopt laws
that reflect what the populace desires.

The more widely understood meaning of the term democracy, then, is that it is synonymous with
representative government in which the people control government through elections. We derive
the term democracy from the Greek word “demos”, which referred to the population of a city
state in Greece. In other words, what government does reflects what the people have chosen
although not necessarily through direct action of the populace.

The word democracy in this broader sense would encompass the American form of government,
which (as noted) is a constitutional republic, in which the public expresses its choices for
governmental action (or lack thereof) through elections. The voters elect not only a president
representatives for the House of Representatives and senators for the Senate well as the president.
The will of the people is then “translated” into legislation and other governmental action not
through the direct action of the people but instead through the judgment of and legislative
drafting by the elected representatives who vote to approve pending legislation that will govern
society, although their enactments are subject to constraints such as the presidential veto,
constitutional provisions, and judicial review. The president then executes the laws, i.e., does
what the legislators direct.

Understood as referring to representative government, democracy is no more under threat than it
was in the technical sense of the word. In 2024, the people plainly voted (a) for a Republican
majority in both houses of Congress and (b) to return Donald Trump to the White House for
another four years. Donald Trump during the campaign made clear what his intentions were with
respect to enforcing the laws of the United States.

Nothing that Donald Trump as done since January 20 should come as a surprise. More than most
presidents, his actions after election have reflected what he promised during the campaign. He
has closed the border and has begun a vigorous campaign of deporting those who have no right to
be in this country, starting with the criminals. He has ended idiotic policies that treated men as
women simply because they believed they were a sex different from their biological sense. He
has begun to reign in the administrative state through removal of those who have no place on
government. He has begun restoring fiscal sanity to government through repeal of Biden era
reckless spending and tax policies.

In other words democracy in the sense of a government that does what the people want is
functioning exactly as it should. What the people voted for in electing Donald Trump and a
Republican Congress is what they are now getting. Democracy is not being threatened; it is
flourishing.

Many in the country disagree with what President Trump and the Congress are doing. That is not
surprising since the election in 2024 was closer than most both at the presidential and
congressional level. And in the next election those disapproving of President Trump’s actions
can express that sentiment by their ballots pursuant to their democratic right to elect their
representatives. Their disapproval of Trump’s actions, however, do not render those actions
“undemocratic”. Barack Obama famously told Republican members of Congress that “elections
have consequences.” And so they do. One of the principles of democracy is that the candidate
who has the most votes wins. What a candidate who receives the most votes does in fulfillment
of his promises is not a threat to democracy merely because the losers don’t like it.

Contrary to the shrill protests of the Left, the United States faces no threat to democracy from
President Trump irrespective of how democracy is defined. Instead, the threat to democracy
comes from unelected federal judges, many of who are lacking in knowledge of basic legal
precepts (as reflected in their confirmation hearings) and barely won confirmation. For anything
that Trump does, the Left can find a federal judge who can prevent enforcement of the executive
action. The cases in which the Left contests the actions of President Trump seem always to find
their way to a relatively small number of federal judges pre-disposed to rule against trump.

Fortunately, the judicial threat to democracy at this point is not serious. The frivolous nature of
the actions of unelected federal judges is reflected in the now almost routine appellate rulings
staying what the district court judges have ordered. Stays of trial court judgments are typically
not easy to obtain; they are the exception rather than the rule. Yet they are now commonplace for
inane district court decisions by incompetent district court judges. The Trump record at the
Supreme Court is 25-2. Democracy indeed remains secure.