The 2016 election was a watershed moment for America. When “sure thing” Hillary Clinton lost, the Left’s carefully crafted and self-promoted assertion of being the most tolerant people in the nation evaporated in an explosion of hate and fury directed at a victorious Donald Trump. In short, Democrats, the media, academia, Hollywood, and the federal government’s seemingly permanent bureaucracy, now referred to as the deep state, made it clear they considered that election illegitimate and the American electorate who perpetrated it “deplorable.” Moreover, beginning long before Trump was elected and through the president’s entire term, they made it clear they would employ any means necessary to unseat him, even if it engendered some of the most blatant abuses of power this nation has ever endured.

None of it was successful, including the effort to get Electoral College electors to violate their oaths, lawsuits citing violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, the machinations surrounding the 25th Amendment, the Mueller investigation, impeachment, or Crossfire Hurricane, which revealed the unprecedented level of corruption that infests the nation’s highest levels of law enforcement and national security.

Even more infuriating, the president — to whom they referred in some of the most derogatory terms ever associated with an occupant with the Oval Office — managed to confound their expectations in no uncertain terms. Prior to the pandemic outbreak, the “Racist-in-Chief” stewarded the lowest unemployment level ever recored for blacks and Hispanics; the “reckless internationalist” defied the military-industrialist “experts” and precipitated a paradigm shift in the Middle East; and the “economic naif” confronted America’s foremost adversary, defying the decades-long “conventional wisdom” that a sufficient level of obsequiousness — and the hollowing out of the American heartland — would turn Chinese communist thugs into pillars of capitalism.

And when those same communist thugs hid the outbreak of coronavirus long enough to alter the trajectory of the entire world? Where most of the public saw tragedy, the Left saw opportunity. Depending on what he did or didn’t do, Trump was “xenophobic,” a “mass murderer,” a “dictator,” or even Hitler himself — even as many of those same leftists were precipitating some of the most draconian lockdowns in the nation, utterly irrespective of their constitutional rights to do so.

Yet as much as they showed their hand with regard to an appetite for power during the pandemic, the death of George Floyd at the hands of four police officers was viewed as the political opportunity of a lifetime, one in which the “fundamental transformation” of a “systemically racist” nation they long abhorred was finally at hand. From May 25 to the present, an orgy of looting, arson, violence, and murder has besieged the nation, precipitated by the well-funded, well-organized Marxist thugs known as BLM and antifa. That outbreak initially engendered hands-off “solidarity” from Democrat mayors and governors that quickly morphed into wholesale support, even when it was their own cities being destroyed.

At that moment, the Democrat Party no longer supported the mob. It became part of it.

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has brought that reality to the forefront. Yet again, leftists have made it clear “by any means necessary” is the only “principle” that animates them. “If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire f—ing thing down,” tweeted former CNN host Reza Aslan. “If McConnell jams someone through, which he will, there will be riots,” warned Washington Post freelancer Laura Bassett, “more, bigger riots.” “We’re going to have to blow up the entire system,” insists CNN host Don Lemon, who subsequently walked back that comment but still asserted that we’re “going to have to get rid of the Electoral College.”

Democrat Party leaders? “We need to make sure we mobilize on an unprecedented scale to ensure this vacancy is reserved for the next president,” stated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When asked if impeaching Trump again was a possible way of stopping the appointment process, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t dismiss the idea. “We have our options,” she deflected. “We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now, but the fact is we have a big challenge in our country.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says he’s willing to consider packing the Supreme Court in retaliation. “It will be a decision that comes to the Senate,” he said. “We first have to win the majority before that can happen … but everything is on the table.”

Schumer isn’t alone. House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, Representative Joe Kennedy III, and a host of other elected Democrats are also in favor of a scheme first endorsed by FDR in 1937, because he didn’t like a number of rulings SCOTUS made regarding his New Deal initiatives.

Moreover, if Democrats do win the Senate, other items “on the table” include statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, turning California into three states, and eliminating the Senate filibuster, all aimed at ensuring the Democrats’ power will be unassailable going forward.

The nomination? Given several Democrat senators’ reprehensible behavior during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, it is likely those same senators will do everything in their power to yet again eviscerate whomever Trump nominates — with the full cooperation of the same media that trumpeted the wholly discredited allegations the last time around. Toward that end, they are being egged on by Hillary Clinton. “You know, every possible procedural obstacle has to be thrown in the way of this power drive by McConnell,” she insisted. “There are things that can be done that need to be done literally 24/7.”

In the meantime, angry mobs have surrounded the houses of Senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham warning them not to hold hearings. And not to be outdone, Ann O'Leary, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff, tweeted that she is “ready to fly to DC in the middle of COVID19 and lay my body on the floor of the United States Senate to prevent a vote from occurring before the next term of Congress.”

No doubt she is not alone. Democrat-inspired contempt for law and order — and their cultivated hatred for those who enforce it — has reached the point where the attempted assassination of two police officers in Compton was met with mob approval by those actually rooting for the officers to die.

None of those ghouls were condemned by Democrats who, in various jurisdictions around the nation, have made it clear that the Rule of Law itself must be filtered through various lenses that include ideology, race, and the economic “needs” … of looters.

“Although holding the White House and both houses of Congress in 2017 and 2018, the Republican Party did not irrevocably transform American government,” columnist Doug Bandow explains.

Democrats will make no such promises. And Americans who vote for them can offer a variety of reason for doing so, but one reality is inescapable:

If one empowers Democrats, one empowers the mob.