Trump Is the Only Threat

We can't afford to pretend otherwise

Image credit: Beck Seamons

Editor’s note: While the Utah Monthly generally refrains from endorsing candidates for political office, we have decided that the stakes of the 2024 presidential election are far too high for us to remain silent. Donald Trump’s reelection as president would severely and perhaps permanently damage our constitutional system. We feel morally obligated to stand in opposition to his candidacy. This is not about politics, but rather the fate of our constitutional government. The following editorial is the first in what we hope to make a series of posts (a mix of both news and opinion pieces) on the 2024 presidential election as it touches Utah.

In an otherwise commendable op-ed on the importance of voting recently published in the Deseret News, BYU professor James C. Phillips, the director of the Wheatley Institute’s constitutional government initiative, makes one clear blunder. Namely, Phillips opens his essay by drawing this troubling—and false—equivalence between President Biden and his likely opponent in the general election, Donald Trump:

Undoubtedly, this election year brings grave concerns. One party’s leading candidate faces numerous criminal indictments and has been barred from appearing on the ballot in two states. The other party’s leading candidate is under an impeachment inquiry for his potential involvement as vice president in the business of his criminally indicted son.

Donald Trump is facing 91 felony counts in four separate indictments. Across four different jurisdictions, he was duly indicted by a grand jury of his peers on a range of serious charges, including conspiracies to defraud the United States and violate civil rights in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. This is indeed a cause for grave concern. President Biden, on the other hand, confronts not a legitimate impeachment inquiry into his conduct as vice president—one grounded in actual evidence—but rather a thoroughly politicized investigation, conducted by a faction of far-right House Republicans. As the New York Times has reported, “a yearlong G.O.P. investigation . . . has failed to produce evidence of anything approaching high crimes or misdemeanors.” The Associated Press has likewise noted that “no evidence has emerged that Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes in his current role or previous office as vice president.”

Thus, the only “grave concern” this Biden impeachment effort raises is really just the same concern that we have already identified—Donald Trump’s behavior; two of Trump’s most ardent supporters in Congress, Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan, are leading the baseless impeachment inquiry in order to curry favor with the former president. That the Wheatley Institute’s chief constitutional scholar would attempt to equate Trump’s alleged criminality—breathtaking in its scope—with the flimsy and disingenuous allegations that have been leveled at President Biden by House Republicans is deeply concerning. If the Wheatley Institute is serious about its mission to “strength[en] society through research-supported work that fortifies the core institutions of family, religion, and constitutional government,” and we believe it is, it must come out in unequivocal opposition to the only man currently threatening to upend the American constitutional order, Donald Trump. This is not a time for Joe Biden “whataboutism” and unserious finger pointing. We believe the Wheatley Institute is much better than this. Latter-day Saints are much better than this, as one of us recently observed in a Salt Lake Tribune op-ed. Let’s prove as much at the ballot box this November, and in our advocacy until then.