Yep, Trump’s electoral win was historic. Having lost the Electoral College and popular vote in 2020, he’s already secured the former, and, once all the votes are tallied, he will probably claim the latter, a clear mandate. Incredibly, he survived two assassination attempts in a single campaign.

He endured criminal cases galore: a federal election interference case, a Georgia election interference case, a classified documents case, and a hush-money case. His political opponents labeled him a fascist, a rapist, a misogynist, a racist, and an “extinction-level threat to democracy.” There is no man more viscerally hated in the United States than Donald J. Trump. In spite of it all, he persuaded enough voters to be elected the 47th president.

Given the odds, it is easy, and perhaps justified, for conservatives, Republicans, and Trump supporters of all varieties to do a victory lap. But they shouldn’t let their guards down; that would be short-sighted, and evince a misgiven, even naive optimism. For every weapon leveraged by the establishment elite to destroy Trump has been and can be used to wage war against anyone identified as a threat to the leftist political project.

Everything They Did to Him …

One need not be a Trump supporter to appreciate the lengths to which his enemies sought to destroy him, as bestselling author Lee Smith notes in his book Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic. Given how easy it is to forget even what happened in recent political memory, it’s worth recalling how much the leftist establishment has done since Trump’s entrance into politics to scuttle his presidential aspirations.

In 2016, that establishment, to include not only corporate media, but even many within our defense and security institutions, alleged that Trump colluded with Russia in order to win that presidential election. The Steele Dossier, supposedly a bombshell document exposing Trump’s collaboration with Russia, may very well have been manipulatively informed by Russia, per the final report by Special Counsel John Durham, which censured the FBI for its “serious lack of analytic rigor.” Though legacy media and leftist institutions screamed incessantly over the thousands of false social media posts disseminated by Russian actors, experts could never offer a convincing answer on how this actually affected voting patterns in the 2016 election.

During the pandemic, corporate media blamed Trump for deaths related to the coronavirus, though they themselves promoted policies that isolated the elderly, kept millions of healthy children home from school for more than a year, and aggravated our mental health crisis. The left in turn attacked Trump and his circle as racist for blaming China for its role in propagating the virus, though the Wuhan lab leak story is now acknowledged as credible by those same people.

When he urged Americans to not let fear of Covid dominate their lives, the media tarred him as an insensitive, sheltered ogre, though those same journalists later admitted America had overreacted to the threat posed by Covid. When he sought to put down racially motivated unrest that killed Americans and cost an estimated $2 billion in damages, Dems and corporate media compared him to an authoritarian strongman.

When Trump ran for reelection, the Democrat Party, legacy media, social media, and a significant number of senior former members of the intelligence community sought to suppress and denigrate the Hunter Biden laptop story, a de facto conspiracy that a majority of polled Americans believe likely affected the outcome of that election. TIME Magazine even had the temerity to run a February 2021 article entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.” The piece quoted “dozens” of participants explaining how “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, work[ed] together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

After that election came the egregiously corrupt rounds of lawfare, executed by politically biased public servants in Georgia, New York, and the District of Columbia, all with the obvious intention of ending Trump’s political career and putting him behind bars. Suspected financial activities most district attorneys routinely ignore to pursue much more important and dangerous crimes — a reality even leftist media acknowledged — were investigated with a fine-tooth comb, as leftist lawyers cynically exploited the powers of the state to effectuate a particular political outcome.

… They Will Do to You, Too

Some may think all of this has to do with Trump himself, a controversial, often hated person and political force. But such an analysis is deeply flawed. For as they did this to Trump, they’ve done it to many others. The Democrat Party and corporate media collaborated in running sophisticated scorched-earth campaigns against three conservative three Supreme Court justices: Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

They’ve invested incredible resources to destroy the reputations of J.D. Vance, Trump cabinet nominees such as Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, and a long list of Republican politicians such as Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Tim Scott. Nor do they stop at politicians: conservative journalists, pro-life activists, and even evangelicals and Catholics are all valid targets of this potent machine.

What all of the above individuals have in common is that they are perceived as threats to the leftist ruling class of government bureaucrats, the media, academia, Big Tech, and the entertainment industry. Though the members of the establishment direct their biggest guns at the most powerful targets, they have proved time and again that they are not afraid to attack ordinary American citizens in order to send a message: They are the ones wielding and accumulating power, and anyone bold enough to try and stop them will suffer the consequences.

All Americans, regardless of political affiliation, should be alarmed by this, because every tool used against Trump — targeted media investigations, public cancellation, state-run prosecutions — they will use against you.

Regardless of what you think of Trump, it’s terrifying to consider what the leftist establishment did to him over the last eight years. Its concerted, multi-faceted effort to “disappear” him is a caution for all Americans. As Lee Smith argues, their actions against Trump reflect “an elite campaign to demoralize and desecrate a republic.”

Trump is simply the current target of their rage. As innumerable examples demonstrate, that rage can be directed at any American regardless of his power or position. Citizens who love their liberty should take heed.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.