The left, politicians (including, sigh, some Republicans) and media are quick to raise this question when confronted with claims that Biden's presidential "win" is fraudulent.

But no one, not even Republicans, I believe, raises this question when confronted with assertions that President Trump is an authoritarian president.  See, for merely the latest example, Francis Fukuyama's review of Ruth Ben-Ghiat's Strongmen. Mussolini to the Present in the January 3 New York Times Book Review.  Fukuyama began his review with the assertion that President Trump "sought to undermine a growing list of American institutions that stood in his way, including the intelligence community, the FBI and Justice Department, the courts, the mainstream media (which he branded 'enemies of the American people') and of course the integrity of elections themselves."

Welcome to political Bizarro World.  Everything in the quoted passage is turned upside-down, including the comment about the media, which, certainly, has become the enemy of the First Amendment, and consequently of the people.  And it wasn't President Trump who halted ballot-counting in the middle of night on November 3–4, or who changed election rules, or who called for signature-free mail-in ballots by the ton.

It is the Intelligence Community, the FBI, and the Justice Department (that gave us the Mueller probe) and a number of courts that undermined the Trump presidency from the time of his candidacy until this very day,  with the aim of his figurative defenestration out of the Oval Office.  Or has Professor Fukuyama already forgotten the names of Comey and Strzok and Brennan and Clapper and Yates and also H. Clinton and Obama and Biden and Steele, inter alia?

Author Ben-Ghiat includes Italy's Silvio Berlusconi among her Strongmen, and Fukuyama chides her on this choice, pointing out that the former Italian prime minister "didn't murder political opponents or support terrorism abroad[.]"  Did President Trump, Professor?

A simple question that the left, including Fukuyama, has (intentionally?) refused to ask: Are authoritarian presidents investigated by a special counsel with unlimited resources for more than two years, or do they tolerate a media that is some 93 percent against them, in reports, opinion columns, and editorials expressed in the most vitriolic of political terms?  And where, in autocratic regimes, is a legislative body to be found that sought the overthrow of the autocrat?

The key to understanding the opposition to President Trump is to take the accusations and apply the terms to the accuser — including the accusation that it is the president who lies all the time.

Image: Pixabay