Democrats constantly accuse Donald Trump of constantly lying. Journalistic factcheckers, who work for Democratic-aligned media companies, back their claims with statistics. But it’s the Democratic Party that’s facing historically low approval ratings. In poll after poll about one issue after another, voters say they trust Republicans more.

A major contributing factor to the diminishment of the public’s trust in the Democratic Party is the stream of revelations that Joe Biden spent much if not all of his presidency mentally incapacitated. Seventy-two percent of voters told the May 21 Rasmussen poll that “it’s a serious scandal that White House staffers were aware of Biden’s declining mental condition but worked to conceal his condition from the public and members of Congress, including 48% who consider the scandal Very Serious.” Another Rasmussen survey, conducted May 27, indicates that Americans think Democrats have also been covering up the truth about the former president’s physical health: “63% … believe it’s likely that Biden has been suffering from prostate cancer since at least 2021, including 43% who consider it Very Likely.”

We’re waiting for more data about the Biden effect. But you don’t have to be a political genius to suss out that the public doesn’t like being lied to, really doesn’t like being lied to day after day for years, and really really really doesn’t like knowing they’re being lied to. Having your intelligence insulted is more infuriating than being deceived.

When asked about their coverup of Biden, Democratic pols answer that they’re “looking forward.” Which is exactly the opposite of what crisis management experts — and this is definitely a crisis for Democrats — recommend.

True, refusing to comment is sometimes an organization’s least bad move. When facts are unclear, it’s smarter to announce an investigation (a “holding statement”) rather than to say something that further erodes trust when that statement later proves incorrect. That’s not the case here, though. To those who paid attention, Biden’s dementia was evident when he ran in 2020.

Candidly admitting fault can increase legal exposure — anything you say will be used against you. Though congressional Republicans are threatening to investigate what Dems knew about Biden’s brain and when, the real risk to Biden’s enablers is political embarrassment, not prison time.

In most crises, it’s best to come clean. Stonewalling makes things worse. Studies of crisis communication strategies, such as those based on W. Timothy Coombs’ situational crisis communication theory, show that refusing to talk about an issue or blowing it off as no big deal — as Democrats are doing now — increases the public’s perception that you’re guilty or irresponsible.

Democrats beware! Your silence is creating a vacuum that will allow your GOP enemies to shape a narrative you otherwise might have helped to shape in your favor. That’s what happened to BP after it deflected and downplayed the severity of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill; environmentalists framed the company as an eco-criminal. United Airlines’ decision to delay its apology to the Asian American passenger who was dragged off an overbooked flight made the company look racist as well as cruel. Toyota’s corporate culture of silence cost it dearly after the carmaker pretended that a series of brake problems were figments of their customers’ imaginations.

Better to come clean sooner rather than later. For Democrats, now — with the midterm elections well over a year away — is the least worst time.

The gold standard for crisis management is still the 1982 Tylenol poisoning crisis, when a still-unidentified maniac killed seven people in Chicago. It must have been tempting for Johnson & Johnson to deny that it was the company’s fault. After all, it wasn’t. Instead, the company introduced tamper-proof packaging and recalled every single bottle at a cost of $100 million. Transparency and action worked. Within a year, Tylenol had recovered 90% of previous sales.

In the case of the Democratic Party and its media allies, on the other hand, the Biden coverup is their fault. The smart move would be to emulate what KFC did in 2018, when it foolishly switched to a delivery partner that couldn’t supply enough chickens to hundreds of the company’s restaurants in the United Kingdom. The company posted updates to social media and ran a funny “FCK” apology ad in newspapers that won public relations awards. Share prices and sales bounced back within weeks. Like the Democrats, Southwest Airlines was caught dead to rights, its sin being cheaping out on overdue upgrades to IT infrastructure. When the antiquated system crashed, thousands of flights were canceled. CEO Bob Jordan apologized and promised to invest in upgrades right away. Customers forgave.

If Democrats want to recover their credibility any time soon, they must apologize. Party leaders — Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, Kamala Harris — should hold an hourslong press conference where they repeat a message along these lines: “We lied to you about Joe Biden. We knew he wasn’t up to the job of president, but we covered that up. We were so desperate to beat Donald Trump, so panicked that he would turn us into a fascist country, that we lost sight of what makes American democracy great — the right of a free people to choose its leaders. That choice is only legitimate when the voters know everything they need to know. Democrats don’t win by out Republican-ing the Republicans, and we don’t win by out-lying them. We screwed up. We’ve learned from our mistake. It won’t happen again.”

Throw some people under the bus to demonstrate your party’s willingness to police itself. Pelosi is 85 and semiretired; she could step down. Harris doesn’t seem to have much of a political future anyway, not least because she had to have known all about what was going on with Biden and abdicated her 25th Amendment duty to move for his removal. Consider pushing out some of the oldest members of Congress, like Steny Hoyer (85) and Jim Clyburn (84), and definitely get rid of those whose mental acuity is seriously in question, like John Fetterman, to avoid repeats of the awkward spectacle that marked Dianne Feinstein’s final years in the Senate.

Most importantly, take action. Don’t merely cooperate with a Republican investigation. Lead one of your own. Establishing the precedent that a president who suffers from dementia should be kicked out could be useful in the near future, considering Trump’s own advancing years (78). Make the party more transparent by, for example, livestreaming all meetings of the Democratic National Committee. Make it more democratic by getting rid of superdelegates in national elections and supporting insurgent outsider candidates if and when they win primaries.

If Democrats want to look forward, they first must clean up the mess they made in the past.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.”

“Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, pulls from 200 interviews in order to expose Democrats’ coverup of Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical decline from his son Beau’s death in 2015 through his presidency and into his misbegotten 2024 reelection campaign. The book’s thesis is that Donald Trump’s return to power was the direct result of Biden’s decision to run again despite his dementia, symptoms of which caused his catastrophic debate performance and subsequent withdrawal from the race.

Like a motorist gawking at the debris of a gruesome accident, I couldn’t put down this eulogy for American electoral democracy. Part of it, I’ll admit, was how thoroughly “Original Sin” vindicated my own assessments of Biden dating back to 2020, which did not make me popular with Democrats. Mainly, though, it’s a page-turner.

What Biden and his coterie of minders did to himself, the Democratic Party and the country — far and away the biggest political scandal in U.S. history — is too big to fit into one book, no matter how essential or well-written, both of which “Original Sin” is.

An “original sin” is a metaphor that recalls Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit. It is a foundational error, systemic problem or inherent defect that leads to future negative consequences. Frederick Douglass argued that slavery was the “great sin and shame of America” — the nation’s original sin. William Jennings Bryan said “the fruits of imperialism … is the one tree of which citizens of a republic may not partake.”

In the same way that a number of factors contributed to humanity’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden — Eve’s insistence, Adam’s deference and curiosity, and of course that rascally snake — the Democratic Party’s plot to install a mentally diminished Biden into the White House, keep their ruse going for four years and overplay their hand by trying for another four stemmed from motivations and had ramifications that don’t appear in Tapper and Thompson’s book.

When I evaluate sin (Is it one? If so, how serious?), I put myself in the shoes of the perpetrator and ask myself: Might I have done the same thing in the same circumstances? Reading “Original Sin,” I have to say, no way. No one with a scintilla of decency would have done what Jill Biden and a cabal of self-appointed Biden gatekeepers nicknamed “the Politburo” — former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, senior advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn, and deputy chief of staff Jen O’Malley Dillon — did.

They carried out a silent coup d’etat.

They’re traitors.

It gets short shrift in the book, but a big portion of the original sin of the Biden presidency is the raison d’etre of his first campaign — to stop Bernie Sanders. Bernie was the early favorite in the Democratic primaries. Party bosses should have been pleased. He consistently led Trump in national head-to-head polls during February and early March 2020, with margins ranging from 4 to 9 points, often outperforming or matching other Democratic candidates like Biden, who finished fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire and a distant second in Nevada.

But Sanders’ attacks on corporations and the “billionaire class,” and promise to turn away big-money contributions, pissed off the party’s wealthy donors and corporate-aligned leaders. His proposals to break up big banks and tax billionaires threatened the financial elite who held sway over the Democratic National Committee. Better to lose with a corporate candidate, they decided, than to win with a self-described “democratic socialist.” On Feb. 27, 2020, The New York Times ran a piece with a shocking headline: “Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders.” A few days later, the day before Super Tuesday, party leaders secretly orchestrated joint high-profile endorsements from rival candidates Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke, who dropped out and backed Biden.

Would it really have been so awful to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and give sick people access to Medicare for All? For the billionaire class, obviously yes.

But why Biden and not one of the other 21 primary contestants? Klobuchar didn’t have enough name recognition. Buttigieg didn’t do well with Blacks. Like Bernie, Elizabeth Warren was too radical for the big corporate donors.

Establishment Democrats claimed Biden was the most electable. But that wasn’t why they elevated him. Bernie, after all, was at least as electable as Biden. It came down to politics — Biden was a corporatist — and familiarity. And Biden was mentally and physically weak. For the big-money people, the ability to push him around was a feature, not a bug.

Roughly one-third of American vice presidents have become president, whether by succession or getting elected on their own. The main job of a vice president is to be qualified and prepared to become commander-in-chief.

Choosing a vice presidential running mate, therefore, is obviously not a decision to be undertaken lightly. That goes double when the presidential candidate is, at age 77, the oldest ever elected (at the time). According to “Original Sin,” the universal consensus in Bidenworld was that Kamala Harris was unpleasant, untalented and not up to the job of running for president, much less serving as one. When the president dropped his reelection bid, most people in the party leadership didn’t want her to jump in because her polls were no better than his.

The book doesn’t spend much time on how and why Harris got the nod for veep. But surely a significant part of the original sin that led to Trump 2.0 was the party’s inability to quickly transition to an appealing figure to replace Biden. Kamala’s campaign was such a disaster, polling in the low single digits, that she was forced to withdraw in 2019, without having participated in a primary. On that basis alone, she never should have been considered to run with Biden.

Biden pulled out of the race in July 2024. Four years too late.

By all accounts, he had become utterly incapable of doing the job as president. Yet he remained in office another six months. What if World War III had broken out during that time? It made no sense to tacitly admit Biden was senile while allowing him to continue pretending to work as president.

He should have resigned when he dropped out, leaving Harris as the incumbent president. Her campaign would have benefited from the optics of taking the oath of office, governing, and being seen with foreign leaders. And Biden would have made history by bringing about the first presidency by a woman of color.

Last but certainly not least, the book barely touches upon the Gaza war. It takes note of the fact that many younger voters decided not to vote at all rather than to turn out for Biden due to his age. But many were also furious at both Biden and Harris for supporting the Israeli onslaught against the innocent people of Palestine.

So many original sins! Sadly for the nation, it’s not just Democrats who must atone.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.”

“What did the president know, and when did he know it?” That was the iconic question posed by Howard Baker, the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee, during televised hearings in 1973, to former White House Counsel John Dean about Nixon’s knowledge of and involvement in the break-in at Democratic HQ and the subsequent coverup.

Now we need someone — presumably a Republican exercising Congress’ constitutional oversight duty — to ask someone in the know — definitely a Democrat who worked inside the White House — what former President Joe Biden didn’t know and when it became clear that his thoughts were turning foggy.

As most voters are only learning now that it’s too late, after the election, there is ample evidence that we were repeatedly misled by top administration officials and their allies in the media about Biden’s mental acuity and the physical effects of his advanced age, the highest ever for a president. Now that he’s been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer, a disease that would have been detected by the standard prostate-specific antigen test administered annually to U.S. presidents, we must ask: Were we lied to about his physical conditions too?

In January 2024, then-Vice President Kamala Harris painted a picture of a leader who was sharp as a tack: “I’ll tell you, the reality of it is, and I’ve spent a lot of time with Biden, be it in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room and other places — he is extraordinarily smart. He has the ability to see around the corner in terms of what might be the challenges we face as a nation or globally.”

Democratic media allies laid it on thick. “I’ve said it for years now, he’s cogent. But I undersold him when I said he was cogent. He’s far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been, intellectually, analytically, because he’s been around for 50 years. … Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And F you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said that in March 2024.

“As sharp as ever,” former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called Biden on July 3, 2024, a week after his catastrophic debate performance. Biden dropped out of the race on July 21. To hear her tell it, the president was an intellectual tornado: “He is someone that engages with us. He wants to know, he pushes us … wanting to figure out like the bigger picture of whatever we’re trying to explain to him, or even granular details.”

During this same period, we now know, White House aides did not allow most cabinet members to see the president. Biden appeared “incoherent and frail” during a White House meet-and-greet with influencers before the April 2024 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, struggling to tell understandable stories. Biden couldn’t recognize George Clooney at a June 2024 fundraiser, prompting the actor to write an alarmed op-ed.

Clearly, we were lied to. Or the people around Biden were stupid. Or both.

We need to find out exactly what happened. Because the worst possible interpretation is really bad: that a cabal of Democratic National Committee insiders, Biden staffers, family members and journalistic stooges deliberately misrepresented Biden’s cognitive state to get him elected, keep him in place for four years while unelected ciphers secretly ran the country, and then plotted to run what was left of him for a second four-year term, during which they planned to maintain their increasingly ridiculous ruse. If even half of these allegations are true, this was a silent coup d’etat. Democracy depends on the people knowing who and what they are voting for; anything less is an alien form of government.

The political powerbrokers who aided and abetted the Biden coup are still in place. Unless they are exposed, they will remain in a position to subvert the people’s will. As things stand, something like this can happen again. While it’s tempting to “look forward” — Democrats’ current crisis-response talking point — and instead focus on illegal deportations and other outrages being carried out by President Donald Trump, we must clean house and hold those responsible accountable. Democratic voters should remember that what Jake Tapper calls Biden’s “Original Sin” — his decision to run for reelection — gave us Trump 2.0. That choice was masterminded by current Democratic Party leaders who gambled democracy against what they called fascism, and lost.

Some people tried to raise the alarm.

Dean Phillips, the former Minnesota congressman who challenged Biden in the 2024 primaries, promised to continue the president’s policies but worried about his chances in a general election. Party bosses retaliated by stripping him of his committee chairmanship and declaring him a pariah.

After spending hours deposing him in October 2023, Special Counsel Robert Hur declined to prosecute Biden over the classified documents he took home with him after leaving the vice presidency in 2017, concluding that a jury would see him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Democrats called Hur a cruel partisan hack. Tapes of the depositions confirm Hur’s assessment.

I cried into the wind over the years:

March 9, 2020: “Joe Biden obviously has dementia and should withdraw. … Democrats are conspiring to gaslight the American people by engineering the presidential election of a man clearly suffering from dementia.”

Nov. 7, 2020: “Biden will be the first president to begin his first term with clear signs of dementia.”

April 2, 2021: “The president has dementia.”

Those who pointed out that the emperor had no brain were ignored, insulted, marginalized and accused of ageism and secretly supporting Trump. Apologies would be nice. But what is more important is to clear the air by exposing the truth so that the next time something like this happens, Americans who raise the alarm get taken seriously.

Why hasn’t the GOP Congress opened an investigation into the Biden coup? Maybe they’re afraid of setting a precedent that could soon be used against Trump. After all, he’s the same age as Biden was in 2020 and has a similar tendency to babble incoherently. Or perhaps they’re following Napoleon’s advice to never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake.

Republicans need to step up. Did Democrats knowingly install a president they knew was senile and/or suffering from an advanced fatal disease?

It’s time for Congress to find out.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.”

Antisemitism as we know it has resulted from a complex witch’s brew of historical stereotypes, economic resentments, ignorance and political extremism. Antisemites believe that Jewish people “have too much power,” “have too much control and influence,” and “are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want.”

A central, paranoid canard of antisemitism is that Jews secretly manipulate the media, business, politics, academia and other institutions via a shadowy cabal. Rational people know this is not and cannot be true. One in five Jewish households in the U.S. is either poor or near poor, meaning they cannot make ends meet or are barely managing to do so. If practitioners of their 4,000-year-old religion are dedicated to conniving and getting rich, they’re doing a lousy job.

Antisemitism is poisonous and stupid. Yet after decades of subsiding, it appears to be spreading again. Zionism — or, more specifically, the tactics being deployed by some Zionists to stifle their political opponents — is a contributing factor to the recent increase.

Supporters of Israel have long argued that criticism of the Jewish state and/or the policies of its government is tantamount to antisemitism. Since many of the most strident enemies of Zionism are ultra-religious Jews and many of the most passionate opponents of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians are Jewish, this too is not and cannot be true. After Hamas broke through the Gaza-Israel barrier and attacked Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, Americans who back Israel have come closer than ever before to institutionalizing a presumed equivalence between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly declared the two to be one and the same in a bipartisan resolution, the once-staid Anti-Defamation League began counting reports of anti-Israel speech as antisemitic incidents, and Ivy League universities like Columbia and Harvard adopted disciplinary codes that ban speech against Israel, including protest demonstrations.

Criticizing Israel has long been fraught. Now it’s more dangerous than ever. You can be doxxed, fired, blacklisted, suspended, expelled, stripped of your college degree, arrested, overcharged with felonies or disappeared and deprived of medical care to the point of imperiling your life. You can even have your application for citizenship summarily denied or be deported.

If the idea is to make people afraid of speaking their minds, these strongarm tactics are working — discussion of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East has all but vanished from campuses and workplaces. Zionists and their Trump administration allies don’t seem to mind. They say they’re fighting antisemitism, a goal all decent people agree with.

One wonders if they’ve considered the consequences of their aggressive approach, which brooks no dissent or criticism — and operates ruthlessly behind the scenes to get people. When you violate the privacy of and endanger passionate young antiwar protesters, and you derail their educations, and you pull strings at the White House to get them violently deported, will they start supporting Israel? It’s far likelier that they, their friends and family members, and those who read about what happened to them, will conclude that Zionists are vicious, disgusting people — that they “have too much control and influence.” Since Zionists have conflated their loyalty to a country with the practice of a religion, some may start to resent Jewish people as well.

Let’s say you’re one of the 30% of American voters, according to the ADL, who already believe Jews control the media. Supporters of Israel are working overtime to confirm your bigotry.

News coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza spills nearly as much ink on the few hundred hostages seized by Hamas as the thousands of Gazans killed by Israel. Few Democratic or Republican politicians are willing to criticize Israel, much less call for severing military and diplomatic relations to force Israel to stop its war — because they’re both afraid of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group. That, obviously, is influence.

Or, let’s say you think American Jews are like the man behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz,” pulling strings to get their way. Then you read how Angelica Berrie, a wealthy donor to Columbia, lit up her private direct line to that university’s president for months, threatening to withhold future payments unless the school provided “evidence that you and leaders across the university are taking appropriate steps to create a tolerant and secure environment for Jewish members of the Columbia community.” Yet when you scour the internet for evidence that Jewish students at Columbia have suffered intolerance, there’s little there there. Instead, the university has banned Jewish groups that support Palestine, suspended and expelled their members, had them arrested and roughed up by the cops, and when that wasn’t enough for the donors, they got the president fired and convinced President Donald Trump to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research grants.

Even after all that, Columbia didn’t issue a peep of protest when one of its recent master’s degree graduates, Mahmoud Khalil, was dragged off into the night by unidentified goons in an unmarked car in front of his eight-month-pregnant wife and dumped in a private Louisiana prison, where he remains. His crime, according to Trump: peacefully protesting Israel’s war against the people of Gaza. Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk, currently out on bail, was similarly kidnapped off the street; her offense, according to the authorities, was coauthoring an op-ed in the student newspaper asking Tufts to support the Palestinians. The president and his secretary of state say these and other recent roundups are just the beginning, and that anyone who criticizes Israel risks deportation and similar abuse at the hands of the U.S. government.

Whatever one’s opinions on Israel, it’s impossible to deny that this tiny country the size of the state of New Jersey, with no natural resources to speak of, enjoys unique lese-majeste status — a special don’t-go-there zone that has become even more ferociously defended under Trump. France is a close U.S. ally, yet Americans can say anything they want about it or its president, Emmanuel Macron. If you’re a green-card holder or attending an American college on a student visa, you need not fear deportation for insulting Eritrea on social media, or protesting Brazil on campus, or penning an op-ed about the rascals who govern South Korea.

The right-wing crackdown on anti-Israel commentary orchestrated by Zionists and their MAGA allies of convenience did not evolve organically, resulting from a vigorous and open exchange of views in a free society. There has been no buy-in, nor any effort by individuals and organizations who support Israel to reach out to people with moderate views, much less those who believe Israel is waging genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. There has only been bullying. If you dare speak out against Israel, sinister forces that you may or may not ever be able to identify will declare you an antisemite and crush you.

Which might prompt you to conclude that you’d been the victim of people who “use shady practices to get what they want.”

The philosopher Nigel Warburton shrugged: “Users of slippery slope arguments should take skiing lessons — you really can choose to stop.” But slippery slopes are a thing precisely because people often choose to keep cruising along until they smash into Sonny Bono’s tree.

Critics from both parties describe Donald Trump’s behavior and policies as unprecedented. This presidency, however, did not emerge from a vacuum. Everything Trump does builds on presidential politics of the not-so-recent past — mostly, but not always, Republican.

Trump has shocked free speech advocates and civil libertarians by ordering his masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons to abduct college students off city streets for participating in campus protests criticizing Israel for carpet-bombing Gaza. (An aside: What will he say when someone avails themselves of their Second Amendment rights rather than allow themselves to be chucked into an unmarked van by random strangers?)

Government oppression of dissidents in America has a rich and foul history. During the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests, which included many college students, Bill Clinton’s Immigration and Naturalization Service (the predecessor of ICE) detained and initiated deportation proceedings against students from Canada and Europe who were arrested for opposing free trade agreements. Under Ronald Reagan, the INS moved to deport African students who participated in rallies urging colleges to pull investments out of apartheid-era South Africa. Richard Nixon’s FBI and INS worked to revoke the visas of students who protested the Vietnam War, particularly those from Canada and Latin America. George W. Bush conducted “extraordinary renditions,” including off U.S. streets, where individuals like Maher Arar, who was entirely innocent, were detained without charge and sent to third countries for interrogation that included torture, under the guise of national security.

Trump is demanding that universities and major law firms bend the knee, insisting that college administrators surrender to federal oversight and eliminate DEI policies, and that attorneys allocate hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono legal work to clients allied to Trump.

It’s freaky — but there is precedent for this kind of bullying.

Even though universities like UC Berkeley, Columbia and Kent State viciously suppressed anti-Vietnam War protesters, Nixon threatened to cut federal funding unless they unleashed even more police violence. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program spied on professors and students, and Nixon’s Justice Department fired off letters to university presidents demanding that activist students be suspended or expelled. Nixon’s INS visa revocations normalized targeting student activists; Trump exploits that now.

Under Reagan, the Education Department threatened to withhold federal funds from colleges whose admission and financial aid policies included affirmative action. Bush went after universities like MIT, NYU and the University of Michigan for allowing international students and faculty to criticize U.S. foreign policy. The DOJ and FBI demanded student visa records and monitored campus groups — especially Muslim student associations — for links to radical Islamists.

Franklin Roosevelt attacked “Wall Street lawyers” for obstructing his New Deal, and his top officials leaned on firms to represent labor unions pro bono in order to make up for their alleged pro-business bias.

Though the Trump administration will almost certainly fall short of its goal of deporting a million people it alleges are in the United States illegally, this White House looks exceptionally aggressive against illegal immigration due to moves like deporting 238 alleged (but probably not) Venezuelan gang members to a private for-profit gulag in a third country with which they have no affiliation, El Salvador, and refusing to bring back one it admits was expelled illegally as the result of an “administrative error.”

But the real deporters in chief were Clinton, who “removed” 11.4 million undocumented workers from the U.S., and Bush, with 8.3 million. The Bush administration kidnapped “enemy combatants” without due process and shipped them the U.S. concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. Detainees from countries like Afghanistan and Yemen were held in a third country (Cuba) without being returned to their home nations. Some were later transferred to fourth countries like Albania or Qatar for resettlement or further detention.

You have to go back further to find antecedents for Trump’s 10% universal tariff on all imports, up to 145% tariffs on China, and reciprocal tariffs on about 90 countries. Still, here too, there’s nothing new under the sun. Biden continued Trump’s first-term 25% tariffs against China. Reagan slapped tariffs against Japan and Canada. Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which added an average of 45% tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to try to protect farms and industries during the Depression.

Then there are the Department of Government Efficiency mass firings orchestrated by Elon Musk. Musk’s chainsaw-wielding theatricality aside, going after federal bureaucracy with an axe instead of a scalpel is anything but new.

Through his National Performance Review (later renamed “Reinventing Government”), Clinton eliminated 377,000 federal jobs — 17% of the total workforce. He got rid of about 100 programs and consolidated 800 agencies. Not unlike Musk’s “fork in the road” mass email offers, Clinton offered buyouts up to $25,000 to about 100,000 federal workers. Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Nixon each fired tens of thousands of federal workers. Like Trump, Reagan called for the elimination of the Department of Education; probably like Trump, he failed.

In most cases, such as Nixon’s surveillance or Clinton’s deportations, liberals and mainstream media offered brief, muted criticism. If there had been broader and more sustained outrage in response to these previous outrages, odds are that Trump would be operating with somewhat less untrammeled volition today.

We can’t go back in time. Hopefully this moment will remind us that there are consequences for every decision not to protest and not to raise hell — and that those consequences may play out in the distant future.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.”