Was Biden Extra Authoritarian Than Trump?

“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” This statement related to a federal mandate compelling 100 million Americans to take poorly tested Covid shots. This applied to private sector workers, too, and you could be fired for refusing.

Oh, the remark was made on September 9, 2021 — by Joe Biden.

Yet it’s President Donald Trump who accused of being “authoritarian.”

One man finding this a bit odd is someone who talks regularly with Trump: longtime commentator Bill O’Reilly. He suggests that, if anything, it’s Biden who behaved in a more authoritarian manner.

A Human Wrecking Ball

Rendering his analysis on the Wednesday edition of his show No Spin News, O’Reilly first described Trump’s rationale for his governing style, stating:

So the president was elected to clean up the dire mistakes that President Biden made. This … in Trump’s mind gives him the mandate to act in a rather assertive manner, and there is validity to it. So when Trump left office in ’20 and Biden came in, economy was pretty good. Putin didn’t cause any trouble. Everything was okay.

Not quite everything, many would note. The Covid lockdowns caused a 2020 net job loss of approximately 9.4 million, and 100,000-200,000 small businesses closed permanently. Also note, however, that the vast majority of these job losses and business closures were in Democrat-run states.

This again underlines how much of what determines our economic health are state-level decisions, as opposed to presidential actions. (For example, the so-called affordability crisis — which no one mentioned during the high-inflation Biden days — is inordinately a blue-state phenomenon.)

O’Reilly then continued, outlining the worst of Biden administration trespasses:

Biden comes in, first thing he does is collapse the border. And there was no Congress. There was nobody else to blame. It was Biden and his crew in the White House.… Talk about authoritarian. My ***, there’s no vote, no discussion. First day, don’t enforce immigration law. Executive orders went out. Fifteen million come in … maybe a million and a half criminals. I mean, really bad, bad people, unsupervised all over the country, cost the United States trillions of dollars. And still to this day, we’re paying billions of dollars to try to get this immigration thing under control.

Mortal Sins

Many would point out, however, that the above understates the matter by highlighting mainly financial consequences. In reality, “flooding the zone” with a de facto foreign army was a left-wing attempt to cement power. The short-term idea was to raise liberal states’ populations so as to give them greater congressional representation. The long-term idea was (and is) to change America’s demographics so as to widen the Democrats’ voter base.

O’Reilly next mentioned operation Warp Speed, which expedited the Covid shot’s creation. He takes a far rosier view of its results than most New American readers (or I) would. To the point here, though, Trump was always clear that taking the shots should be voluntary. Moreover, many Democrats initially showed disdain for the “Trump vaccine,” sometimes expressing reluctance to take it.

Yet as soon as they regained federal executive power, the Democrats made the shot their baby — and their hammer. They aimed to make such inoculations compulsory.

O’Reilly also made the following points about Biden’s fumbles:

• Massive spending in Covid’s wake (Build Back Better, Inflation Reduction Act) flooded the economy with trillions, causing nine percent inflation. Congress (Democrat majorities) passed the legislation.
• Ongoing problems: High food prices (some declining) and out-of-control insurance premiums (health, car, home).
• Trump inherited border chaos, Putin’s Ukraine invasion, Gaza crisis, and other issues — from the Bidenites.

Trump’s MO

So Trump knows he has a lot of cleaning up to do. What’s more, says O’Reilly — who, again, Trump regularly consults with — he knows Congress won’t help. The “Democratic Party is allied [virtually] 100 percent against Donald Trump” (and the RINOs run interference, too), states the commentator. “They’re never going to support anything he wants.”

So what’s a president to do? Trump has resolved to use his Article II (executive) power to the hilt, O’Reilly informs. Trump also won’t be constrained by international “law,” a video clip the pundit played made clear, when it conflicts with what he believes is right.

This disturbs leftists, of course. It is true, too, that having good relations with other countries is beneficial. Yet we’re not to be governed by international law, but constitutional law and all statutory law congruent with it. Only internationalists believe otherwise.

This said, our leaders have been violating the Constitution for more than a century. In fact, late economist Walter E. Williams estimated decades ago that approximately two-thirds of our federal budget involves unconstitutional matters. It’s surely worse today, too.

Freedom Eaters

Now, one of the results (and purposes?) of the Left’s ad hominem attacks — e.g., “Trump is a dictator!” — is that they distract from the deeper reality. That is, we’ve been incrementally losing freedom for decades. Some examples:

• The Biden administration pressured social-media companies to censor content on issues such as the Hunter Biden laptop story and Covid-19 policies. The “Twitter files’” release and admissions by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google prove this conclusively. In fact, ultimately starting to bear their fangs more openly, the Democrats even created their “Disinformation Governance Board.”
• President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats forced Americans to buy health insurance — or pay a fine.
• Democrats often endeavor to trample Second Amendment-protected rights, such as with certain red flag laws (may enable firearm confiscation without due process).
• The Democrats have weaponized government. One example was the indictments against political opponents such as Trump, seen as election interference. Another was the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups under Obama.
• Suppression of dissent via public shaming and legal coercion. For instance, Democrats forced businesses to comply with left-wing social engineering such as same-sex “marriage” mandates. They went so far as to sue Christian businessmen who dissented.
• Expansion of government power in areas such as environmental regulations (e.g., EPA overreaches bypassing Congress). This is part of the wider issue of transforming the federal bureaucracy into a de facto legislature.

Diagnosing Tyranny

Examples aside, though, there is a way to estimate how free you are — and who is snatching the freedom. To wit: In every or most every case a law (or regulation or mandate) constitutes the removal of a liberty. For a law states there’s something you may not or must do. Therefore, the more laws you have, the less free you are on average.

Now consider: Every year public officials create more laws, regulations, and mandates (LRMs), but hardly ever rescind any. This means that as time wears on, we become progressively less free. Call it creeping totalitarianism.

And what’s the tally?

Including all levels of government, we now have several million to 10 million LRMs nationwide. Even just federal and major state LRMs amount to approximately 100,000-300,000.

Now figure out what ideological group is disgorging most of these freedom snatchers and you’ll know who the real would-be authoritarians are.

For those interested, the entire O’Reilly segment is below.