Democrats are masters at gaslighting, doing one thing and blaming the other side.

They engage in what the Clintons derided as “the politics of personal destruction,” and then they complain that Republicans are the ones doing it. They shut down the government by blocking a continuing resolution, and they blame Republicans for not saving ObamaCare. They weaponized not only the Justice Department but many other government agencies, and now they’re aghast that Donald Trump is giving them a dose of their own medicine.

The big difference? Trump is up front and open about what he’s doing and how he’s going about it. Democrats pretend they’re holier than thou while they stab thou in the back.

Trump beats Democrats at their own game and they just. Can’t. Stand it.

Whereas they invented crimes to wage lawfare against him, he is ensuring the DOJ prosecutes those who unlawfully weaponized the previous DOJ to undermine his administration.

With that intro, let’s turn to The New York Times, which featured a story yesterday titled “How Trump Is Using the Justice Department to Target His Enemies.” The story doesn’t use the word “unprecedented,” but it’s strongly implied: “His calls for prosecutors to file criminal charges against his adversaries have eroded the Justice Department’s decadeslong tradition of independence from the White House and threatened the rule of law.”

Gosh, this has never happened before!

The story opens with a graphic showing the four people and one organization that Trump has indicted, investigated, or otherwise “targeted.” Leading that list is former FBI Director James Comey, who was arraigned in Virginia yesterday and pleaded not guilty of lying to Congress. The DOJ’s case isn’t exactly air-tight, and Comey will likely be acquitted, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t disgrace himself and the FBI in his politically weaponized tenure.

The Times huffs, “Each of the targets Mr. Trump has pursued through the Justice Department has denied wrongdoing, in statements or through lawyers.”

Criminals protest their innocence; film at 11.

Comey isn’t some angel who was minding his own business, looking for seashells when mean old Trump came along and targeted him. He was at the center of the cabal that conspired to launch a coup against President Trump in his first term, lying all the way about it.

The other subjects of Trump’s ire were likewise not innocent. New York Attorney General Letitia James waged lawfare against Candidate Trump on trumped-up charges. Now-Senator Adam Schiff was an architect of the impeachment efforts, two cases built on lies and distortions.

The day before the Times’s blockbuster, at least three Democrats expressed horror about all the norms Trump’s DOJ is supposedly breaking.

Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) is “gravely concerned” at the idea that Trump may demand prosecution of “opponents or enemies.” Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Anywhere But Vietnam) fretted that Trump “embodies” weaponization. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Chicago Mob) warned of “Trump’s long crusade to weaponize the federal government against his perceived political enemies.”

Durbin hysterically continued, “Never in the history of our country has a president so brazenly demanded the baseless prosecution of his rivals.” And then he accidentally admitted something: “And he doesn’t even try to hide it.”

Yeah, that’s what I said.

Democrats hide it, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do it. Trump doesn’t mess with the pretense of trying to hide anything.

Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley expected Democrats to make such claims, and he was ready for them.

“I’ve heard them say that Joe Biden never targeted his political enemies,” Hawley began. “Joe Biden never directed his attorney general to target his political opponents. Huh? That’s interesting because I could have sworn that yesterday we learned that the FBI tapped my phone.”

Hawley’s phone wasn’t technically “tapped.” The FBI swept up call records, not, according to Senator Chuck Grassley’s initial report, “the content of the call.”

Still, Democrats think they can get away with their “unprecedented” hysterics because this and so many other shenanigans were carried out by cutouts. It wasn’t Joe Biden who weaponized the DOJ, they insist. It wasn’t even Attorney General Merrick Garland. If anything happened, it was Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Well, Smith reported to Garland, who reported to Biden.

Hawley noted the weaponization of the DOJ and FBI against Catholics, pro-lifers, and parents at school board meetings, too. He added that “92 conservative organizations [were] put under surveillance.” In other words, it wasn’t the Trump DOJ targeting powerful people; it was the Biden DOJ targeting the defenseless.

It was Democrats screaming about “democracy” while trying to arrest, jail, and remove from the ballot the Republican presidential candidate.

“Gee, I don’t know,” Hawley said sarcastically to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “would you call that an example of weaponization?”

Bondi agreed, calling it “the ultimate weaponization” and promising it has ended.

I don’t always love the way Trump operates, and I’d love to see the president show much more constitutional and political restraint. I wish he wouldn’t stoop to the Democrats’ level. He certainly doesn’t embody Erika Kirk’s model of grace and forgiveness.

But he didn’t start us down this path. Spare me the outrage of this supposedly unprecedented assault on our institutions. Democrats weaponized and/or destroyed those institutions a long time ago, and now they don’t want to play the game by the rules they created. That’s laughably and outrageously hypocritical.

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(Corrected to note that Hawley was incorrect to use the word “tapped.”)