Claude's List of 101 Things Biden and the Democrats Did (and Might do) that Many Trump Supporters See As Undemocratic

After you do that, we plan to submit a second query that asks you to compare the two lists and identify areas of overlap in which you think it might be possible to develop a bipartisan consensus around steps that could be taken to strengthen democracy that both sides would see as a step forward.

Claude's Response:

Claude’s response:

101 Ways the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party Have Undermined the Health of American Society and Democracy, and How the American Public Can Respond

Oct 22, 2026 

[Heidi and Guy's Caveat: At the end of this document, Claude says lists its sources and adds that "Other items, such as court rulings, inflation figures and public statements, reflect widely reported events; specific figures should be confirmed against primary sources before publication." There are so many specific figures in this document, that we just spot checked them, and found no errors.  We did not check them all.]

This is a companion to "101 Ways the Trump Administration has Undermined the Health of American Society and Democracy." It is written in the voice of a hypothetical conservative who supports many of the Trump administration's goals but shares a deep concern for democratic norms. It follows the original's format so the two lists can be compared side by side. Factual claims were checked against public reporting as of October 22, 2026; the characterizations and judgments are the author's perspective, not Beyond Intractability's. Many items here are disputed by Democrats, just as many items in the original are disputed by Republicans. Some of those disputes are noted in the closing section.

A Conservative's View

101 Ways is a conservative's inventory of actions by the Biden administration, and by the wider Democratic Party, that went beyond pursuing a progressive agenda. It covers the four years of the Biden presidency, the conduct of Democratic officials since, and what a future Democratic administration has signaled it intends to do. The goal is the same as my colleague's: to name what crossed the line, so that neither party repeats it.

I have been a conservative for most of my adult life. I have voted mostly for Republicans, sometimes for third-party candidates, and on a few local races for Democrats I trusted. I support a secure border, a smaller federal government, energy abundance, school choice and the freedom of religious Americans to live out their convictions. I supported many of the goals of the Trump administration. I have also been troubled by a good deal of how those goals have been pursued, and I recognize much of what my colleague wrote.

That is the point of this companion piece. Reading his list, I found myself agreeing with some items and wincing at others. But I also noticed what was missing. For many conservatives, the democratic crisis did not begin in January 2025. It was building through four years in which the border was effectively opened, courts were defied, speech was policed, a President's decline was hidden, opponents were prosecuted and half the country was described as a threat to the republic.

Like my colleague, I do not want to demonize anyone. I have friends and family who voted for President Biden and Vice President Harris, and they are good people. This is not a commentary on progressive values. It is a commentary on conduct: on things that, once the heat of the moment passes, most Americans of any party should agree went too far.

Character and process matter to me as much as they do to him. A government that gets the policy right but breaks the rules to do it teaches the other side to break them too. That lesson has now been learned by both parties. If we want to stop the cycle, each side has to look honestly at its own contribution.

So here are 101 observations, grouped by theme. The last group looks forward: it describes what Democrats have openly said they intend to do if they regain power, and why that worries people like me.

Border and Immigration

• 1. On its first day, the administration halted border wall construction, moved to end the Remain in Mexico policy and announced a 100-day pause on most deportations (later blocked in court). Whatever one thinks of those policies, reversing them all at once, with no replacement, sent a signal to the world that the border was open.
• 2. The result was the largest border surge in American history. Nationwide encounters totaled about 10.8 million from FY2021 to FY2024, compared with roughly 3 million in the previous four years, according to CBP data compiled by the House Homeland Security Committee.
• 3. Parole authority, which Congress intended for case-by-case humanitarian emergencies, was turned into a mass-admission program. The House committee counted more than 1.4 million people admitted through the CHNV parole and CBP One programs alone. When the executive branch rewrites immigration law by stretching a narrow statute, it takes the decision away from the people's representatives.
• 4. More than 500,000 unaccompanied children crossed the southwest border during these four years. Federal oversight reports later found that authorities could not reliably account for the whereabouts and welfare of many of them, leaving children exposed to trafficking and labor exploitation.
• 5. Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas repeatedly told Congress and the public that the border was secure while record crossings were under way. He became the first Cabinet secretary impeached by the House since 1876; the Senate dismissed the articles without holding a trial.
• 6. Cities far from the border, including New York, Chicago and Denver, were overwhelmed by new arrivals. Billions of dollars in local budgets were diverted to shelter and services, straining schools, hospitals and public patience, and fueling resentment that has poisoned the immigration debate ever since.
• 7. Preventable crimes by people released into the country, such as the murder of nursing student Laken Riley in Georgia, became national symbols. Many Americans felt their government had dismissed their safety concerns rather than addressed them.
• 8. Border Patrol encountered roughly 400 people on the terrorist watchlist between FY2021 and the end of 2024, along with large numbers of known "gotaways" who were never apprehended. A government's first duty is to know who is entering the country.
• 9. As resources shifted south, the northern border was neglected; northern border encounters in FY2024 were more than 600 percent higher than in FY2021.
• 10. For three years the administration said its hands were tied until Congress acted. Then, in June 2024, months before an election, it issued an executive action restricting asylum. That showed the tools had existed all along, and it made voters wonder whether border policy was driven by politics rather than principle.
• 11. Many Democratic officials treated concerns about illegal immigration as bigotry and, in sanctuary jurisdictions, actively obstructed federal enforcement. In December 2025, a Milwaukee County judge was convicted of felony obstruction for helping a man evade immigration agents in her courthouse, yet she was widely praised on the left. Selective obedience to federal law is exactly what conservatives are accused of.

Executive Overreach and Defiance of the Courts

• 12. After the Supreme Court struck down the administration's roughly $400 billion student loan cancellation plan in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), President Biden boasted publicly that the Court had blocked him but that this hadn't stopped him. A President bragging about working around a Supreme Court ruling is precisely the attitude my colleague rightly criticizes in President Trump.
• 13. The administration then pursued cancellation through other routes, including the SAVE repayment plan, which federal courts also blocked. Shifting hundreds of billions of dollars of debt from borrowers to taxpayers who never attended college, without a vote of Congress, is a textbook case of the executive taking Congress's power of the purse.
• 14. In August 2021, President Biden extended the CDC's nationwide eviction moratorium while acknowledging that most constitutional scholars thought it would not survive legal challenge. The Supreme Court struck it down weeks later. Knowingly acting unconstitutionally to buy time is not a mistake; it is a strategy.
• 15. The administration used OSHA, a workplace-safety agency, to impose a vaccine-or-test mandate on roughly 84 million private-sector workers. The Supreme Court blocked it in January 2022. Whatever the merits of vaccination, the federal government has no general police power to order it.
• 16. The ATF reclassified millions of lawfully owned pistol braces, turning law-abiding gun owners into potential felons overnight by rule rather than by statute. Federal courts vacated the rule.
• 17. Days before leaving office in January 2025, President Biden declared that the Equal Rights Amendment was "the law of the land," even though the national archivist, his own appointee, had determined it was not validly ratified. A President cannot amend the Constitution by press release.
• 18. In 2024, the Office of Personnel Management issued rules designed to make it far harder for a future President to remove or reassign senior career officials. Conservatives saw this as an effort to entrench an unelected bureaucracy against the results of the next election.
• 19. Major regulations on power plants and vehicle emissions were written to force a rapid shift to electric vehicles and away from fossil fuels, decisions of enormous economic consequence that Congress never voted to make. The Supreme Court had already warned in West Virginia v. EPA (2022) that such "major questions" belong to Congress.

Lawfare and the Weaponization of Justice

• 20. In October 2021, days after the National School Boards Association asked for federal help against parents protesting at school board meetings, comparing some of them to domestic terrorists, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to coordinate a response. The NSBA later apologized for its letter, but parents across the country learned that objecting to curriculum or COVID policy could put them on a federal radar.
• 21. In January 2023, an FBI field office in Richmond produced an internal memo proposing to investigate "radical-traditionalist" Catholics as potential extremists. The memo was withdrawn after it became public, but it confirmed for many believers that the federal government viewed traditional faith with suspicion.
• 22. The Justice Department used the FACE Act aggressively against peaceful pro-life activists, including elderly protesters who received prison sentences and a Pennsylvania father arrested at home by armed agents (a jury acquitted him). Meanwhile, the dozens of attacks on pregnancy resource centers and churches after the Dobbs leak produced very few federal prosecutions. Equal justice requires equal enforcement.
• 23. The FBI searched a former President's home at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 over classified documents. When classified documents were also found in President Biden's garage and former offices, the special counsel declined to prosecute. Democrats point to real differences, including allegations of obstruction, but to millions of Americans it looked like two standards of justice.
• 24. The Manhattan District Attorney turned a years-old, misdemeanor-level bookkeeping matter into 34 felony counts against the leading opposition candidate using a novel legal theory, in the middle of a presidential campaign. Many legal scholars across the spectrum questioned the theory.
• 25. New York's Attorney General campaigned on pledges to go after Donald Trump, then won a civil fraud judgment that, with interest, exceeded $450 million. In August 2025 an appellate court threw out the penalty as excessive. Prosecutors who run for office promising to pursue a particular person undermine faith in impartial justice.
• 26. The Fulton County, Georgia prosecution was derailed when the District Attorney was disqualified by an appeals court over a personal relationship with the special prosecutor she hired; the case was eventually dropped. It became a symbol of prosecution driven by politics rather than the law.
• 27. Colorado and Maine officials removed the leading Republican candidate from their presidential ballots under the 14th Amendment, without any criminal conviction for insurrection. The Supreme Court reversed unanimously in March 2024. Keeping a major candidate off the ballot is a far greater threat to democracy than most of what it was meant to prevent.
• 28. Prosecutors offered the President's son a remarkably lenient plea agreement that collapsed in open court in July 2023 when a judge questioned its unusual immunity terms. IRS whistleblowers testified that the investigation had been slow-walked. The appearance of special treatment for the powerful corrodes trust in every other prosecution.
• 29. The violence at the Capitol on January 6 was wrong and deserved prosecution. But the Justice Department charged hundreds of defendants under an obstruction statute that the Supreme Court later ruled had been stretched too far (Fischer v. United States, 2024), while many participants in the destructive 2020 riots were treated far more leniently. Selective severity fuels the grievances that led to the pardons my colleague criticizes.

Pardons and the Rule of Law

• 30. President Biden repeatedly promised that he would not pardon his son and would respect the jury's verdict. In December 2024 he issued a sweeping pardon covering any offenses over an eleven-year period. Breaking that promise told Americans that the rule of law bends for the President's family.
• 31. On his last day in office, President Biden issued preemptive pardons to officials including Dr. Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley and members and staff of the House January 6 committee, none of whom had been charged with anything. Preemptive pardons for political allies set a dangerous precedent that any future President can now cite.
• 32. In his final hours, he also pardoned several of his siblings and their spouses, again preemptively. Whatever the fear of retaliation, self-protective family pardons are exactly what the pardon power was never meant for.
• 33. In December 2024, the President commuted about 1,500 sentences in a single day, the largest one-day act of clemency in modern history. It included Michael Conahan, the judge at the center of Pennsylvania's "kids for cash" scandal. Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro said the President got it absolutely wrong. Mass clemency without individual review is not mercy; it is abdication.
• 34. Weeks before leaving office, the President commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row, including murderers of children and police officers, overriding the verdicts of juries and the wishes of many victims' families on his way out the door.
• 35. A House Oversight Committee report in October 2025 found that the White House process for confirming the President's approval of clemency and autopen signatures was inconsistent and poorly documented. Democrats called the investigation a sham, and the report did not identify a specific action taken without Biden's authorization. But the public deserves certainty that the elected President, not his staff, is exercising the most personal power of the office.

Speech, Censorship and the Information Environment

• 36. In an August 2024 letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured the company for months in 2021 to remove certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and that he regretted going along. Government officials leaning on private platforms to suppress lawful speech is censorship by proxy.
• 37. The President publicly accused social media companies of "killing people" by hosting vaccine misinformation, and the Surgeon General formally sought information from platforms about misinformation on their sites. The message to companies was clear: moderate the way the government wants, or face consequences.
• 38. In April 2022, the Department of Homeland Security announced a "Disinformation Governance Board." Public backlash forced it to be paused within weeks and disbanded months later, but the instinct that a federal agency should arbitrate truth was alarming.
• 39. Federal cybersecurity officials worked with outside research groups and platforms to flag election-related posts for review, a practice critics called "switchboarding." The Supreme Court ultimately dismissed the resulting lawsuit on standing grounds in 2024, without endorsing the practice, after a lower court had found the government likely crossed the line into coercion.
• 40. Before the 2020 election, 51 former intelligence officials signed a letter suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop story had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, and the FBI's warnings led Facebook to demote it. The laptop turned out to be authentic. Using the credibility of the intelligence community to shape an election is a profound abuse of public trust.
• 41. Americans who questioned COVID orthodoxy, especially those who said the virus may have come from a lab, were labeled spreaders of misinformation and in some cases removed from platforms. The FBI and the Department of Energy later assessed, with differing levels of confidence, that a lab-related origin was most likely. Treating legitimate scientific debate as dangerous speech damaged trust in public health for a generation.
• 42. The State Department's Global Engagement Center, created to counter foreign propaganda, funded organizations that rated American news outlets for "disinformation risk" and steered advertisers away from them, disproportionately conservative ones. Taxpayer money should never be used to defund domestic media.
• 43. Prominent Democrats have argued that "misinformation" and "hate speech" fall outside First Amendment protection, a position that is legally wrong and politically dangerous. The answer to bad speech in a free society is more speech, not government-defined categories of forbidden opinion.

Candor, Competence and the Concealment of Decline

• 44. For years, the President's inner circle and allies insisted he was sharp and fully in command, and attacked anyone who said otherwise. In February 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur's report described him as a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." The White House responded by attacking the prosecutor rather than addressing the concern.
• 45. The administration asserted executive privilege to withhold the audio of the President's interview with the special counsel, keeping from voters the very evidence that would have let them judge his condition for themselves.
• 46. In June 2024, the White House press secretary dismissed videos showing the President's apparent confusion as "cheap fakes." Weeks later, the June 27 debate showed 50 million Americans what insiders had known. The public was not misinformed by the internet; it was misinformed by its own government.
• 47. Much of the national press accepted these assurances and treated questions about the President's fitness as partisan smears. Trust in the news media has since fallen to record lows, and the press's handling of this story is one reason why.
• 48. In July 2021, the President said a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was highly unlikely. Weeks later Kabul fell, and he then called the evacuation an extraordinary success. Americans watched the opposite on their screens.
• 49. Officials told Americans that inflation was "transitory" for most of 2021, then named a $700-plus billion climate and health spending bill the "Inflation Reduction Act," though the Congressional Budget Office projected it would have a negligible effect on inflation in the near term. Branding is not honesty.
• 50. President Biden said for years that he had never discussed his son's business dealings. His son's former business partner, Devon Archer, later testified that Biden joined business calls and dinners with his son's associates, even if the conversation was social. Small evasions on matters of family profit erode trust in everything else.
• 51. Vice President Harris was publicly assigned to address the "root causes" of migration and widely described as the administration's border lead. When the crisis became a campaign liability, allies and parts of the press insisted she had never been the "border czar." Rewriting the record in real time insults voters' memories.
• 52. As the House Oversight Committee report later documented, aides made extensive use of the autopen and limited some Cabinet secretaries' direct access to the President. Whatever one concludes about who decided what, a democracy cannot function when voters do not know who is actually exercising the powers of the presidency.

Elections and Institutional Hardball

• 53. President Biden called Georgia's 2021 election law "Jim Crow 2.0" and "Jim Crow on steroids," and Major League Baseball moved its All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest. Fact-checkers faulted several of his claims about the law, and Georgia went on to post record turnout, including among Black voters. Falsely telling Americans that their state is suppressing their votes damages faith in elections just as surely as false claims of fraud.
• 54. In a January 2022 speech in Atlanta, the President urged the Senate to abolish the filibuster to pass Democratic election bills and asked senators whether they wanted to be on the side of Bull Connor or Jefferson Davis. Casting principled opponents of a bill as segregationists is demonization, not persuasion.
• 55. The proposed For the People Act would have federalized large parts of election administration, which the Constitution leaves primarily to the states, overriding state laws on voter ID, voter rolls and redistricting. Democrats regularly accuse Republicans of trying to seize control of elections; this was the same impulse from the other direction.
• 56. Executive Order 14019 directed every federal agency to develop plans to promote voter registration and participation. Critics argued that, in practice, it enlisted agencies whose outreach would reach some communities far more than others, putting the machinery of government to work on a partisan project.
• 57. In 2022, Democratic campaign committees spent millions of dollars boosting election-denying candidates in Republican primaries because they were easier to beat in November, while simultaneously warning that those same candidates were a threat to democracy. If Democrats truly believed it, they would not have funded it.
• 58. In 2024, the Democratic Party nominated a presidential candidate who had not received a single primary vote, after shielding the incumbent from primary debates and, in Florida, canceling the presidential primary altogether. A party that calls itself the defender of democracy chose its nominee without its voters.
• 59. Democratic-aligned lawyers filed challenges to keep Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein, Cornel West and the No Labels effort off state ballots. Reducing voters' choices through litigation is hard to square with the language of protecting democracy.
• 60. Democrats in Washington, D.C., and New York City passed laws allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections (New York's was struck down by the state's highest court in 2025). Voting is a defining right and responsibility of citizenship; diluting that link erodes the meaning of citizenship for everyone.
• 61. In 2025, California Democrats asked voters to suspend the independent redistricting commission they had long championed as a model for the nation, in order to redraw congressional maps for partisan advantage. Texas Republicans moved first, but answering one partisan gerrymander with another abandoned the principle rather than defending it.
• 62. Democratic leaders routinely describe voter ID requirements as voter suppression, even though large bipartisan majorities of Americans, including majorities of Black and Hispanic voters, support them. Dismissing a mainstream view as racist makes common ground on election integrity impossible.

COVID-Era Governance

• 63. Schools in many Democratic-run cities and states stayed closed or remote long after evidence showed in-person learning could be done safely. Records later showed that the CDC's February 2021 school reopening guidance incorporated language suggested by a national teachers union. Children, especially poor children, paid the price in learning loss that national test scores still show.
• 64. The military's COVID vaccine mandate led to the discharge of roughly 8,000 service members before Congress forced its repeal in December 2022. Ending careers of people who served honorably over a personal medical decision hurt readiness and trust in military leadership.
• 65. Federal mandates for contractors and health care workers made little or no allowance for natural immunity from prior infection, which a large share of the population had by 2022. Policy that ignores evidence in the name of "following the science" breeds cynicism about science itself.
• 66. The President told unvaccinated Americans in September 2021 that "our patience is wearing thin," and officials spoke of a "pandemic of the unvaccinated." Shaming tens of millions of fellow citizens, many of them working-class and minority Americans with real concerns, deepened divisions that persist today.
• 67. Officials and allied scientists dismissed the possibility of a lab origin as a conspiracy theory early in the pandemic, a position that later intelligence assessments undercut. When public health leaders put narrative ahead of open inquiry, they forfeit the trust they need for the next emergency.
• 68. Emergency spending was rushed out with weak safeguards. The Government Accountability Office has estimated that fraud in pandemic unemployment programs alone ran to roughly $100 billion or more. Carelessness with taxpayer money on that scale is a failure of stewardship, not a rounding error.
• 69. Emergency powers were stretched long after the emergency. The pandemic was used to justify the student loan payment pause for more than three years and the legal basis for mass loan cancellation, and the national emergency was not formally ended until 2023. Emergencies that never end become a permanent shortcut around Congress.

Culture, Family, Faith and Schools

• 70. The administration's 2024 Title IX rule redefined "sex" to include gender identity, with sweeping implications for girls' sports, locker rooms and speech on campus, by regulation rather than by act of Congress. A federal court vacated the rule in January 2025. Changes this fundamental to American family life deserve a democratic debate, not an agency rewrite.
• 71. Court documents unsealed in 2024 showed that staff for the Assistant Secretary for Health urged an international medical association to remove proposed age minimums for surgeries on minors from its treatment guidelines, out of concern that they would fuel state restrictions, and that the limits were removed. When political strategy shapes clinical guidance for children, parents can no longer trust what they are told is "the science."
• 72. The administration created programs that distributed relief by race, including COVID restaurant grants and farm loan forgiveness reserved for "socially disadvantaged" groups. Federal courts blocked them as unconstitutional discrimination. Government treating citizens differently by race, whatever the intention, violates the principle of equal treatment that the civil rights movement fought for.
• 73. A day-one executive order required every federal agency to produce "equity" plans, embedding identity-based frameworks throughout the government. Many Americans experienced the resulting DEI bureaucracy, in government and in the institutions that followed its lead, as divisive and as teaching them to see one another first by group.
• 74. President Biden pledged in advance to choose a vice president and a Supreme Court justice from a particular race and sex. The individuals chosen were accomplished, but announcing that most Americans were ineligible for consideration from the start undermined the legitimacy of the selections and the ideal of merit.
• 75. In 2021, the Department of Education proposed grant priorities for American history and civics that cited the 1619 Project as a model, before dropping the reference after public backlash. Parents of every background want their children to learn the full truth of American history, including its sins, but not to be taught that the nation is defined by them.
• 76. Many Democratic leaders in 2020 embraced or tolerated calls to "defund the police," and Democratic prosecutors in major cities adopted policies of declining to charge whole categories of crime. Communities, often poor and minority ones, bore the consequences in rising violence and disorder, and trust in public safety collapsed in many cities.
• 77. After the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, many elite universities, overwhelmingly led and staffed by people on the left, tolerated harassment of Jewish students that they would never have accepted against other groups, and some Democratic officials were slow to condemn it. Selective concern for minorities is not a commitment to pluralism.

Rhetoric, Demonization and Political Violence

• 78. In August 2022, President Biden described the philosophy of the MAGA movement as "semi-fascism," and in a prime-time speech at Independence Hall, framed in red light and flanked by Marines, he described "MAGA Republicans" as a threat to the very foundations of the republic. A President who campaigned on unity used the bully pulpit to cast tens of millions of fellow citizens as enemies of the country.
• 79. Days before the 2024 election, the President appeared to call Trump supporters "garbage." The White House press office then altered the official transcript, over the objection of its own stenographers' supervisor. Insulting voters and then editing the record compounds the offense.
• 80. Democratic leaders, including the party's nominee, called the Republican candidate a fascist and compared him to Hitler during a campaign in which he survived two assassination attempts. In July 2024, days before the first attempt, President Biden told donors it was time to put Trump "in a bullseye," a remark he later called a mistake. When leaders tell the public an opponent is an existential threat, some unstable people take them literally.
• 81. In 2020, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer stood outside the Supreme Court and warned two named justices that they would "pay the price" for their votes. In 2022, after the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs draft opinion, an armed man was arrested near Justice Kavanaugh's home and later pleaded guilty to attempting to assassinate him. Protests at justices' homes, which federal law prohibits, continued without prosecution, and the leaker was never publicly identified.
• 82. The assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025 was met by many on the left with sorrow, but also by open celebration from some teachers, professionals and activists on social media. Conservatives noticed which leaders condemned the celebrations clearly and which did not. A healthy society treats political murder as a tragedy for all, whatever one thought of the victim.
• 83. In 2025, federal immigration facilities in Texas were attacked, including a fatal sniper attack on an ICE field office in Dallas. Meanwhile, prominent Democratic officials compared ICE agents to the Gestapo or to secret police, and activists published agents' personal information. Rhetoric that casts law enforcement officers carrying out federal law as Nazis gives permission to the violent.
• 84. In November 2025, Virginia voters elected as attorney general a Democrat who, in 2022 text messages, had written that a Republican legislative leader deserved "two bullets to the head" and had made comments about that man's children. He apologized, but the party stood by him. Had a Republican written those words, Democrats would rightly have demanded he withdraw.
• 85. During the 2020 riots, many Democratic leaders minimized the violence as "mostly peaceful," and the future vice president promoted a bail fund that helped release people arrested during the unrest. Excusing political violence when it serves one's side makes it impossible to condemn credibly when it doesn't.
• 86. Democrats who now rightly decry denial of the 2020 election spent years casting doubt on the 2016 result, with Hillary Clinton calling the winner an "illegitimate president" and many officials promoting the Russia collusion narrative that the special counsel could not establish. Election denial is corrosive whichever party practices it, and both have.

Foreign Policy, Economy and Energy

• 87. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 left Americans and Afghan allies behind, abandoned billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment to the Taliban and ended with a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate that killed 13 U.S. service members. No senior official was held accountable. Allies and adversaries alike drew conclusions about American resolve; many believe Russia's invasion of Ukraine months later was one of them.
• 88. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan was passed on a party-line vote in March 2021, when the economy was already recovering, over warnings from Democratic economists such as Larry Summers that it risked overheating. Inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, the highest in four decades, and the cumulative price increases that followed are still the core of the "affordability" crisis families feel today.
• 89. Federal debt grew by roughly $8 trillion over the four years, much of it outside of any national emergency, leaving the next generation a bill they had no voice in running up. Mortgaging our children's future is a moral issue, not just a fiscal one.
• 90. On his first day, President Biden canceled the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, eliminating thousands of jobs, and in January 2024 he paused new approvals for liquefied natural gas exports, a pause a federal court later blocked. These decisions hurt workers, raised costs and weakened allies in Europe who were trying to break their dependence on Russian gas.
• 91. In September 2023, the administration approved a waiver allowing $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds to be moved for humanitarian purchases as part of a prisoner exchange. Weeks later, Iran's proxy Hamas attacked Israel. The funds were then informally re-frozen, but the episode signaled to adversaries that hostage-taking pays.

What a Future Democratic Administration Has Signaled

These items have not happened yet. They are drawn from what Democratic leaders, candidates and party bodies have said publicly in 2025 and 2026, and they are why many conservatives fear a Democratic return to power would accelerate, not end, the cycle of escalation.

• 92. Packing the Supreme Court. In June 2026, the chairs of the Congressional Black, Hispanic and Progressive caucuses introduced a resolution calling for an end to the filibuster and structural changes to the Court, including expansion. Possible 2028 contenders, including former Vice President Harris, Sen. Ruben Gallego, Rep. Ro Khanna and Pete Buttigieg, have endorsed adding justices. A Court whose size changes with each election stops being a court and becomes a third legislative chamber; the next Republican majority would simply add more.
• 93. Abolishing the legislative filibuster on a party-line vote to pass the rest of the agenda, removing the most important remaining incentive for the two parties to negotiate.
• 94. Admitting new states primarily to add Democratic senators, an approach some prominent Democratic strategists have openly described as part of a plan to secure lasting control. Statehood questions deserve debate on their merits, not as a tactic for permanent majority.
• 95. Abolishing the Electoral College, which former Vice President Harris endorsed in August 2026. The Constitution provides a process for this; the national popular vote compact many Democrats support would bypass it.
• 96. Reviving federal control of election administration and overriding state voter ID laws, completing what the For the People Act attempted.
• 97. Abolishing ICE, which has become a litmus test in some 2026 Democratic primaries. Reforming enforcement is a legitimate debate; abolishing interior enforcement altogether would effectively end the enforcement of immigration law Congress has passed.
• 98. Retribution against officials of the current administration. Many Democrats now speak of "accountability" for Trump appointees in the same terms they condemned when Republicans used them. If the next Justice Department pursues the last administration's officials, we will have institutionalized the very retribution campaign my colleague rightly warned against.
• 99. Rebuilding the government-platform partnerships of 2021 to police "misinformation," now extended to AI-generated content, with the same risk that officials will define dissent as falsehood.
• 100. Restoring mass parole and announcing broad legalization by executive action rather than through Congress, repeating the cycle that produced the backlash of 2024.
• 101. Declaring a "climate emergency" to unlock emergency powers over energy, transportation and industry, something Democratic lawmakers urged President Biden to do. If Democrats object to President Trump's use of emergency powers for tariffs, they should not plan to use the same tool for their own priorities.

What We Can Learn, and How We Can Respond

This list is only part of the story, just as my colleague's is. Read side by side, the two lists tell a single story: each party has convinced itself that the other is so dangerous that the ordinary rules no longer apply. Each side's norm-breaking becomes the other side's justification. Pardons answer pardons, prosecutions answer prosecutions, gerrymanders answer gerrymanders and executive orders answer executive orders. If we keep score this way, the republic loses no matter who wins.

George Washington's warning about the spirit of party applies to conservatives as much as anyone. Loyalty to a party or a leader cannot override loyalty to the constitutional order that protects us all, including when the other side is in power. Here, then, are four responses I would offer to my fellow conservatives, and that I hope my progressive friends will take as an invitation rather than an accusation.

• Judge your own side by the standard you apply to the other. Conservatives who objected to Biden's student loan workaround should object to unilateral tariffs. Progressives who objected to January 6 pardons should object to preemptive pardons for allies. A principle that only applies to opponents is not a principle. 
• Defend institutions even when they disappoint you. Courts, elections, the civil service and a free press frustrate every administration. The temptation to pack, defy, purge or delegitimize them is strongest precisely when we believe our cause is most urgent. That is when restraint matters most.
• Demand honesty, including about our own leaders. Concealing a President's decline and denying a lost election are different failures, but both ask voters to disbelieve what is in front of them. Character and candor matter, and voters of both parties should reward leaders who tell them hard truths.
• Refuse to demonize. Calling half the country fascists, garbage, vermin or enemies of the republic is not only wrong; it is dangerous, as the assassination attempts and political murders of recent years show. We can oppose each other's policies fiercely while treating each other as fellow citizens, and we can start in our own families and communities.

I offer these observations with no pleasure. I want a Democratic Party that is strong, principled and committed to the rules, because conservatives need an opposition that keeps us honest, and the country needs both parties to accept that they will sometimes lose.

How a Democrat Would Respond

In fairness, many of these items are contested, and a Democratic reader would raise points such as these:

• The Mar-a-Lago case involved evidence of obstruction and refusal to return documents, which the Biden documents case did not; the Hur report cited that difference.
• The Supreme Court dismissed the social media case (Murthy v. Missouri) because plaintiffs could not show the government caused specific removals, and Zuckerberg himself wrote that the content decisions were ultimately Meta's.
• President Biden backed a bipartisan Senate border bill in early 2024 that Republicans blocked; the June 2024 executive action followed its failure, and crossings fell sharply afterward.
• Prosecutions of Donald Trump were brought by independent state and local prosecutors or a special counsel, with grand juries and juries reaching their own conclusions, and a jury convicted him in the New York case.
• Biden's preemptive pardons were issued in response to explicit threats of retribution, and Democrats argue subsequent prosecutions of Trump critics show the fear was justified.
• Many items in the final section are proposals by individual Democrats, not party platform positions, and some are framed by their supporters as responses to Republican actions, such as the 2016 Senate blockade of a Supreme Court nominee.

Those disputes are themselves a starting point for the comparison this companion piece was written for: where both sides can agree on the facts, and where both can agree on what should never be repeated.

Sources

• House Homeland Security Committee, FY2024 encounter factsheet (Oct. 2024)
• House Homeland Security Committee, parole and northern border statistics
• House Homeland Security Committee, December 2024 statistics
• NBC26: Milwaukee judge found guilty on felony charge (Dec. 2025)
• Philadelphia Inquirer: Shapiro on the Conahan commutation (Dec. 2024)
• The Federalist: House Oversight autopen report findings (Oct. 2025)
• NBC News: House Oversight report and Democratic response (Oct. 2025)
• Zuckerberg letter on Biden administration pressure (Aug. 2024)
• New York Times via Hawaii Tribune-Herald: officials pressed to remove age limits (2024)
• NBC News: Virginia attorney general race result (Nov. 2025)
• Newsweek: caucus chairs' resolution on the filibuster and the Court (2026)
• Bloomberg Government: Democratic candidates on Court overhaul (July 2026)
• Fox News: Harris on the Court and Electoral College (Aug. 2026)
• Bangor Daily News: Maine Democratic Senate debate (July 2026)