From the moment that President Trump was elected, we have been battered by the percussion of a steady drumbeat amplifying the repeated mantra that “Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy.” We hear all the lies over and over:

Trump is a dictator.

He has suspended civil liberties.

He has run roughshod over the courts.

He ignores the law.

He defies the Constitution.

It all is garbage. Pure dirty, disgusting, filthy, lice-ridden garbage. To paraphrase that concierge: “You used to be able to sit out on the stoop like a person. Not anymore! No, sir! Now pure garbage. You get my drift?”

Every initiative Trump has undertaken has been done through proper legal channels. Usually he has sought legislation by meeting behind closed doors with Republican House and Senate leaders. He has worked the phones. He tries to persuade by tweeting. He talks with reporters, giving them direct access to him as he goes to tarmacs and elsewhere. He has tried several times to meet with Democrat leaders, whether in large meetings in large rooms or with Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in the Oval Office that will never be theirs. When his legislative efforts have been stalled — even when he has gotten a Senate majority but has been stalled by the 60-vote filibuster rule — he has accepted defeat. Certainly, he has rued defeat and gone to Twitter to rally his supporters to press Congress, but he has accepted that the rules of the game require him to move on. If he were a dictator, by now Pelosi and Schumer both would be dead under mysterious circumstances, and Adam Schiff finished off in broad daylight. But Trump is a constitutionalist, and he also happens to play by rules.

A dictator would have sealed off the border with Mexico three years ago. Oil along the Keystone XL pipeline would be flowing unabated. All mayors who would have dared declare their municipalities “Sanctuary Cities” would have been arrested by now. Governors declaring their polities “Sanctuary States” all would have been convicted by now and each sentenced to 20 years’ hard labor, alongside the work camp that already exists to hold former governors of Illinois. Ruth Ginsburg would have been forcibly institutionalized by now. The dictator would have done to the Supreme Court what the Democrats propose: he would have added five more justices to SCOTUS. A dictator would not be waiting, one by one, to replace leftist Clinton–Obama judges when they retire but instead would have had half of them arrested and then would have doubled the size of the problematic circuits, like the Ninth, and jam-filled them with conservatives.

Trump a dictator? A threat to democracy? Ha! When he loses, he has his Justice Department appeal. When they get squashed by the Clinton–Obama Judges, he asks his team to appeal to a higher court. When the Ninth stuffs him, he appeals to the highest court in the land. Sometimes he wins, and he is happy. Sometimes he loses, and he is frustrated. And he moves on.

Rarely — if ever — before has a president’s fealty to the Constitution been as sorely tested as Donald Trump has encountered. John Adams had enemies locked up. Lincoln terminated rights and locked up journalists. Woodrow Wilson probably was the most dictatorial president we ever had, suspending Constitutional rights as he pleased to ratchet up support and suppress opposition during World War I.

But not Trump. He tries to initiate legislation. Other times he uses the same phone and pen that Obama used to issue executive orders that he believes are urgently needed in the face of a deadlocked Congress. But he always adheres carefully to the Constitution and to legal precedent. When he is accused of deviating from those norms, he accepts that the courts ultimately will decide. And he obeys.

If there ever was a real threat to our democracy in today’s rancid political climate, it emanates from Pelosi, Schumer, and the Democrats who follow them like lemmings. This coronavirus first appeared in November 2019. By December 31, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan knew about it and were on alert. Singapore knew on January 4. South Korea on January 8. By January 9 the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control were onto it.

And what was Congress doing during this time? We all recall that December was consumed with impeachment, and that the House rushed at double-time speed to impeach before Christmas, then held up the Senate and sat on the articles. As late as January 9, while the WHO and Europeans were latching onto the new disease, Pelosi still was focused on her cat-and-mouse game. On January 15, she was handing out souvenir pens and finally delivered the impeachment papers. All this time, while Pelosi and the Democrats were messing around with impeachment and playing little coy games as to when or whether they would bring the papers to the Senate, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) posted this on January 13:

On January 11, 2020, Chinese health authorities preliminarily identified more than 40 human infections with a novel coronavirus in an outbreak of pneumonia under investigation in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China. Chinese health authorities subsequently posted the full genome of the so-called “novel coronavirus 2019” or “nCoV-2019” in GenBank ®, the NIH genetic sequence database. Subsequently, on January 13, Thailand confirmed detection of a human infection with nCoV-2019 in a traveler from Wuhan City to Thailand. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses, some causing illness in people and others that circulate among animals, including camels, cats and bats. Rarely, animal coronaviruses can evolve and infect people and then spread between people such as has been seen with MERS and SARS. The outbreak in Wuhan, China has been reported to be linked to a large seafood and animal market, suggesting a possible zoonotic origin to the outbreak. There is an ongoing investigation to determine more about this outbreak. This is a rapidly evolving situation and information will be updated as it becomes available.

The CDC further announced at that time that the genome had been posted on the NIH genetic sequence database. It is a matter of public record that the Democrats, the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN, and MSNBC all were obsessed at the time with the nonsensical still-born Pelosi impeachment, doing all they could to focus public attention on that foolishness in their neverending effort to take down Trump, while the gigantic story under their noses — the emerging coronavirus plague — went virtually unreported. These media constantly tell the public that they comprise a vital component of the country’s political welfare and security because, when politicians miss the ball or cover up, they of the media will be there to blow the whistle and to expose the truth to the brutal glare of daylight. Well, in fact, when we actually could have benefited from having an independent and crusading Fourth Estate, they were so busy trying to destroy Trump that they missed the biggest story of the Millennium since the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers. And they missed that one, too. They failed to expose and report that we were admitting into our country untold numbers of Saudis, whom we were training militarily and in air-flight, not even suspicious that some of them were skipping class sessions on how to land a plane. The media back then miserably failed to tell us about Osama bin Laden, who he is, what he thinks, what he wants, what he does. They failed to expose that our various intelligence agencies were not even communicating with each on critical law-enforcement intelligence matters because some idiot Clinton Deputy Attorney General, Jamie Gorelick, had created a document that disrupted information-sharing and created a wall between and among agencies like the FBI and CIA.

The Democrats now blame Trump for coronavirus, for any shortages of hand sanitizer, for financial ramifications. It all is cynical and dishonest, pure lies and garbage. They wasted tens upon tens of millions of our dollars investigating President Trump and his closest advisers and allies from Day One, and all they got for it was a Mueller Report that told them that there was nothing there, and further exposed that Mueller may not have had all that much there any longer either. Then Adam “Shifty” Schiff shifted to the next wave of investigation and tied up the country with another set of months and millions wasted on a ridiculous impeachment farce that had no grounds in reality — or the law. And then, as the coronavirus was beginning to take hold, they had the president tied up with a completely groundless impeachment that lacked any bipartisan support in the House, but instead drew several Democrats to withdraw from it and one Democrat even to withdraw from the party.

These endless internecine efforts by Democrats, aimed not at advancing the public’s needs or the common weal but solely at gumming up the machinery of government and sabotaging the Trump administration, are proving to be the single greatest threat today to our democracy. They raise the question whether or not such a system of government is capable of protecting the public from invasion, be it by military munitions or biological, from abroad and terror at home. They go around the country ranting about “Medicare for All” and about how we need a “Green New Deal” or everyone will be dead in 11 years, but the reality is that the Democrats became so married to “Resistance” in 2016 when President Trump was elected that they have failed to protect the public and to let the president do his job and focus on what he needs to get done. A year ago, Ocasio told us we have 12 years left. Now it is 11. But the failure to let the country focus on the emerging coronavirus has meant that at least 40 Americans are dead now, 22 of them at the same nursing home for the elderly in Democrat-controlled Washington State. They are so busy being the “Resistance” that they failed to help our nation move rapidly towards improving our health resistance.

Only now, with the foolish and cynical impeachment farce behind us, a charade that resulted in raising President Trump’s and Republicans’ approval ratings dramatically, are they reacting to the frantic headlines in their anti-Trump media, the screams and blaring claims that emerge from anti-Trump sorts posting crazy things on Twitter and Facebook. As the president works to mobilize America’s best health experts, they focus on every possible criticism. As though America were acting with less resolve than any country other than Israel. They tried to obstruct the president when he ordered a ban on incoming flights from China. They fought him when he warned that homelessness represents not only a social disaster but also a national health crisis. They mocked him for warning us to be wary of China. Now, as he tries to steady the economy, they leverage democracy for their own cynical gain, realizing that a completely tanked national economy can help Joe Biden get elected president if they can keep America underwater for only eight more months.

This is criminal, to want one’s country to fail, to obstruct efforts to create unity going forward in the face of such a situation. It is wonderful that the health insurers will cover people’s costs of being tested for COVID-19. It is important that workers feel assured they will not be wiped out financially if they stay home while sick, but legislation needs to be crafted in a way that does not turn that national compassion into a pot of gold for crooks who use our largesse to just stay home, stop working, and revert to the welfare and food-stamps days of the Wasted Obama Decade when even the healthy and capable stayed home instead of pulling their fair share. A payroll tax cut, to one extent or another, may be a good idea; do not blow it off completely just because the president suggested it. It will bring cash into the “little guy’s” pockets, and it will protect companies being hit hard. Yes, budget deficits must be considered, but that never bothered Democrats when they voted for “shovel-ready jobs” that proved to be bogus and back-door handouts to their supporters, or dumped nearly one billion dollars on Solyndra alone.

It is an underreported blessing that Trump’s masterful stewardship of the dead economy he inherited from Obama now allows the country some breathing room to act. If the Democrats fail at this time to work cooperatively with the White House, then it is they who will emerge as the real threat to our democracy.