EDITORIAL: Will we become North Korea if voters turn out the president?

Members of the legal community are familiar with the adage: If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table.

A more terse truism might also apply to campaigning politicians: If your record is laudable, pound your record; if your record is inferior, pound your opponent.

President Joe Biden has adopted the latter strategy. Having presided over the worst inflation in 40 years; an utter fiasco at the southern border; soaring utility costs for average Americans; trillions in new debt; skyrocketing annual deficits; a massive expansion of the regulatory state; and a world engulfed in conflict, Mr. Biden — his poll numbers at record lows — has opted to change the subject and paint himself as an ardent defender of democracy against the nefarious would-be dictator Donald Trump.

“Today we are here to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” the president said this month during an address at Valley Forge. “This is not rhetorical, academic or hypothetical. Whether democracy’s still America’s ‘sacred cause’ is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about.”

He went on to say, “The defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency. America, as we begin this election year, we must be clear, democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.”

No need to read between the lines. The theme for Mr. Biden and Democrats this election year is crystal clear: We have a dismal record of governance so let’s petrify swing voters by arguing that the United States — embodying the vital concept of democracy — risks collapse if Mr. Trump is again sent to the Oval Office.

We’ll leave aside the absurdity of the premise that democracy is endangered if a controversial candidate is duly elected through the democratic process or, for that matter, the question of how it serves democracy to allow unelected state officials to keep disfavored presidential hopefuls off the ballot. For this over-the-top progressive hand-wringing to be an accurate assessment, virtually every institutional check and balance in the country would have to acquiesce or fail.

How would Mr. Trump carry out this fiendish plot? Would Congress and the vice president stand down and go along? How about the entire federal judiciary and the Supreme Court? Would career civil servants be on board? The military? Governors? State lawmakers? The American people?

There’s no indication that any of these checks — let alone all of them — would falter. In fact, recent history suggests the opposite.

Say what you will about the Jan. 6, 2021, fiasco, but the guardrails held. Vice President Mike Pence did his duty, those who participated in illegal activity have been prosecuted, and Mr. Biden assumed office without delay. Meanwhile, three years later, Mr. Trump is tied up in various legal imbroglios.

Yet we’re supposed to believe that, if Americans toss Mr. Biden to the curb, Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal observes, “we could be North Korea.”

Mr. Biden’s term most closely resembles Jimmy Carter’s tenure in the White House. It’s no coincidence that Mr. Carter in the 1980 election also desperately sought to deflect attention from his competence by warning voters that the election of his GOP opponent, Ronald Reagan, would push the country closer to nuclear war and represent a “serious threat” to the “safety and the security and the peace of our nation and of the world.”

Mr. Trump behaved shamefully on Jan. 6, and that’s obviously fair game for criticism during a campaign. Whether American voters want a return of his daily drama remains to be seen. But the notion that Mr. Trump will seize authoritarian powers if he is elected is a fantasy concocted by Democratic strategists trembling over Mr. Biden’s abysmal standing with voters.