President Donald Trump justifiably lashed out at the congressional Democrats trying to impeach him, accurately describing the Left’s unseemly effort to overturn the 2016 election as a “coup.”

“As I learn more and more each day, I am coming to the conclusion that what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP, intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given rights as a Citizen of The United States of America!” Trump tweeted Oct. 1 at 4:41 p.m.

ΔΥΣΤΥΧΩΣ ΕΧΕΙ ΔΙΚΙΟ!

Trump was echoing the words of trade adviser Peter Navarro who earlier in the day told Fox Business Network he believed the president was the victim “of an attempted coup d’etat.”

Since even before Donald Trump was elected president the Left has been trying to make the normal presidential job-related things he has been doing look abnormal. The impeachment circus is filled with examples. There were anti-Trump protesters outside the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital in the dark wee hours of Nov. 9, 2016, not long after the media called the race for Trump. The manufactured, media-driven mass hysteria directed against Trump only grew over time.

Even as he was being inaugurated, the Left was howling for Trump’s impeachment, removal from office by the Senate or by military coup, and even assassination, as they came to grips with the fact that the new Chief Executive was deadly serious about protecting America and rolling back President Barack Hussein Obama’s poisonous legacy. No claim or statement has been too crazy, lawless, undemocratic, or barbaric for the Left as it has desperately tried to keep the borders open to Muslim terrorists as well as illegal aliens they view as future Democrat voters, Americans groaning under the chains of Obamacare, businesses buried under mountains of red tape, and the welfare state ballooning.

Obama himself, was in on the plot, as was his Communist Party USA-voting CIA Director John Brennan who used America’s taxpayer-funded national security apparatus to engage in espionage against an opposition presidential campaign, an incoming administration, and that administration’s transition team. The whole campaign aimed at convincing Americans that President Trump was a tool of Russia was created by Democrats for their illicit purposes.

Less than a month into Trump’s presidency what Michael Walsh labeled “a rolling coup attempt” claimed its first victim, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who resigned “in the face of a howling media mob.”

“Make no mistake about what’s happening here: this is a rolling coup attempt, organized by elements of the intelligence community, particularly CIA and NSA, abetted by Obama-era holdovers in the understaffed Justice Department (Sally Yates, take a bow) and the lickspittles of the leftist media, all of whom have signed on with the ‘Resistance’ in order to overturn the results of the November election.”

When former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe turned up no evidence of the Left’s always-bizarre Russian electoral collusion conspiracy theory, it was time to bring in the Ukrainians in this game of musical chairs.

It was Sept. 24 when, after months of public hand-wringing, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi pulled the trigger to begin the process of impeaching Donald Trump, even before reading an allegedly damning transcript of a telephone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, dogmatically declaring that Trump “asked a foreign government to help him in his political campaign at the expense of our national security.”

The unsubstantiated claim is that Trump threatened to withhold a military aid package from Ukraine to pressure that country to investigate the increasingly senile Joe Biden, America’s former vice president, and his cokehead son, Hunter Biden, for their strange adventures in that Eastern European country.

“The actions of the Trump presidency have revealed the dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” Pelosi said. “Therefore, today, I am announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.”

But Pelosi was in such a rush to move forward she didn’t bother asking the House of Representatives, whose duty it is to consider impeachment, to go on record on the matter. Even though the House had a recorded vote all three previous times it considered impeaching a U.S. president, Pelosi decided to skip it this time because, as some Trump critics like to say, Orange Man Bad.

Bill Clinton, who was impeached but not convicted in the Senate, went through it.

On Oct. 8, 1998, the House voted 258-176 to approve what is called a “simple resolution” (meaning it affects only one chamber of Congress) authorizing “the House Committee on the Judiciary, acting as a whole or by any subcommittee thereof appointed by the chairman for the purposes hereof and in accordance with the rules of the Committee, to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House to exercise its constitutional power to impeach President Clinton.”

Richard Nixon, who probably would have been impeached if he hadn’t resigned, also went through it.

On Feb. 6, 1974, the House voted 410-4 to approve a resolution authorizing “the House Committee on the Judiciary to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to impeach President Richard M. Nixon.”

Even a widely despised post-Civil War president went through the process. In the end he was impeached but his enemies fell one vote short of convicting him in the Senate.

Abraham Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, was afforded due process by the House which voted to initiate the impeachment process. “The Joint Committee on Reconstruction rapidly drafted a resolution of impeachment, which passed the House on February 24, 1868, by a vote of 126 to 47,” according to the U.S. Senate’s history pages. “Immediately, the House proceeded to establish an impeachment committee, appoint managers, and draft articles of impeachment.”

Moving measures through the House at breakneck speed, Americans learned during the Obamacare legislative saga, is a Pelosi specialty. She infamously said during that process that reading the massive bill wasn’t realistic. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it,” she said.

The only reason not to go through a formal vote on opening an impeachment inquiry is to railroad the president and eliminate the possibility of lawmakers being held accountable by Americans who may have voted for the president, or even if they didn’t, don’t want to see him impeached. All Americans, no matter their views on our president, deserve to know where their representatives stand on this all-important issue, but Pelosi will have none of it.

So that is a good summary of the reasons Democrats decided to skip the traditional adoption by the House of a formal impeachment inquiry resolution, even though that has been the accepted practice for 151 years.

It is interesting that Ukraine has replaced Russia as the object of the Left’s attention, in the latest chapter of the rolling coup attempt, but it plays a different role. Ukraine is portrayed as a victim of extortion at the hands of President Trump. Russia, as Americans learned from years of Trump-era leftist agitation, is a dastardly villain, even though Democrats have long adored Russia, and before it, the Soviet Union.

The Trump-blackmailed-Ukraine narrative is designed to cover up possible wrongdoing by Democrats.

Democrats now claim that Trump tried to enlist the Ukrainian government to help him in the 2020 election, when in reality, it is the Democrats who have been aggressively reaching out to Ukraine for assistance in fighting Trump.

It was the Democratic National Committee, through DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa, that asked the Ukrainian government for help in sabotaging Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

And it was the blackmailing –to use the Left’s standards— Senate Democrats Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who sent a letter to Ukrainian authorities last year asking them, on pain of losing U.S. foreign aid no less, to investigate President Trump

We know that while he served as Obama’s vice president, in 2015 and 2016, Joe Biden urged the government of Ukraine to increase its anti-corruption efforts while his son, Hunter, was working for Kiev-based Burisma Holdings, which is owned by Mykola Zlochevsky. When he was a Ukrainian government official in charge of issuing natural-gas extraction licenses, many of those licenses were granted to concerns controlled by Burisma. This led to investigations in Ukraine over possible money laundering and government corruption. Zlochevsky and Burisma deny wrongdoing and have not been charged with breaking the law.

Hunter Biden, reportedly a substance-abusing philanderer with no obvious background in natural gas or Ukrainian affairs, earned up to $50,000 a month in his five years with Burisma, becoming a member of its board.

Joe Biden was captured on video at a Council on Foreign Relations discussion on January 23, 2018, bragging about how when he was in office he strong-armed the Ukrainians into firing a prosecutor looking into Burisma during a March 2016 trip to that country during which he was scheduled to announce financial assistance to Ukraine.

“I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. … I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

Joe Biden claims he never discussed Burisma business with his son.

“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden told reporters at a recent campaign stop in Iowa. “I know Trump deserves to be investigated. He is violating every basic norm of a president. You should be asking him why is he on the phone with a foreign leader, trying to intimidate a foreign leader. You should be looking at Trump.”

Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson just unearthed a photo showing Joe, Hunter, and Burisma’s Devon Archer golfing in 2014, the same year Archer joined Burisma’s board.

“The photo,” according to a Breitbart News report, “raises serious questions regarding the extent to which Joe Biden is aware of his beleaguered son’s overseas business deals — something the top-tier 2020 White House hopeful claimed earlier this month he has never discussed with his son.”

Hunter himself contradicted his father in an interview with the New Yorker magazine, claiming the two talked about his business activities in Ukraine “just once.”

Something’s not right here.

Take a guess what.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent announcement that she is opening an official impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Donald Trump struck many Israelis as yet another sign that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump are in the same boat. Both are being hounded by legal elites who will stop at nothing to oust them from office.

There are parallels between the two leaders.

Pelosi’s move followed the leak of a whistleblower complaint to the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general. The complainant alleged that during a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July, Trump sought the Ukrainian leader’s assistance in advancing his 2020 re-election prospects. This is arguable.

During the call, Trump asked Zelensky to speak with U.S. Attorney General William Barr about the private cybersecurity company Crowdstrike. Crowdstrike is the private contractor that was hired by the Democratic National Committee in the spring of 2016 to investigate the hack of the DNC’s computer server.

Crowdstrike concluded that the DNC’s server was hacked by entities related to the Russian government. The DNC never permitted federal investigators to take possession of the breached server or receive Crowdstrike’s full report. Despite the fact that they were never given the opportunity to verify Crowdstrike’s claims, those claims were the basis of the U.S. intelligence community’s assertion in December 2016 that the Russian government hacked the DNC server to interfere in the 2016 election. It was also a foundation of the claim that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia against the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.

In his conversation with Zelensky, Trump said, “Our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … the [DNC] server, they say Ukraine has it. … I would like to have the attorney general call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.”

Trump also talked with Zelensky about former Vice President Joe Biden, now a Democratic presidential aspirant.

During his tenure in office, Biden was responsible for U.S. ties with Ukraine. As investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer reported, in April 2014, Biden’s son Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. Over the next 16 months, Burisma paid Hunter Biden $3.1 million. Biden joined the company while Burisma was under criminal probe by British and Ukrainian investigators.

In a post-vice presidency appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden bragged that he had conditioned the provision of $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to the Ukrainian government—loan guarantees that had already been approved by President Barack Obama—on the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor carrying out the investigation against Burisma. Given the stakes, the Ukrainian government bowed to his demand. The prosecutor was fired and the loan guarantees were extended.

Speaking of Biden’s admitted intervention with the Ukrainian prosecution, Trump said, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”

Democrats claim that Trump’s discussion with Zelensky constitutes an illegal solicitation of foreign assistance for his 2020 reelection campaign. Republicans counter that Trump was reasonably trying to understand what happened to the DNC server in 2016. The story has served as a basis for claims that his presidency is illegitimate, and continuous investigations of his campaign.

Leaving aside the weight of the opposing claims, the fact is that there is nothing unique about Trump’s actions. As Mark Thiessen noted in The Washington Post, in 2018, three Democratic senators urged the Ukrainian government to continue investigations into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.

National Review noted that during the 2016 campaign, the Obama administration asked the Ukrainian government to open a criminal probe against Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. So too, revelations regarding the origins of the Trump-Russia probe which fomented the nearly two-year special counsel investigation showed that the Obama Justice Department based wiretap requests against Trump campaign officials on a dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and compiled by a former British spy on the basis of contacts with Russian operatives.

Democrats calling for impeachment have never shown the slightest interest in investigating the Obama administration’s actions. No Democratic lawmakers called to impeach Obama or members of his administration.

The criminal probes against Netanyahu relate to actions he took to secure positive media coverage that are similar, if not identical to routine political behavior. The two major probes against Netanyahu—dubbed Case 2000 and Case 4000—allege that Netanyahu acted criminally when he met with media owners in bids to secure more positive coverage.

In Case 2000, Netanyahu is accused of having breached the public faith when he met with Yedioth Ahronoth publisher Arnon Mozes in an effort to secure positive media coverage. Yedioth’s coverage of Netanyahu has been unstintingly negative. In Case 4000, prosecutors allege Netanyahu accepted a bribe in the form of positive media coverage on the Walla news portal from Walla owner Shaul Elovich. As with Yedioth Ahronoth, Walla coverage of Netanyahu has been almost uniformly hostile.

Leading jurists from professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard University to professor Avi Bell from Bar-Ilan University agree that the legal proceedings against Netanyahu are political and based on prejudicial and selective enforcement of statutes which prosecutors are interpreting inventively.

As is the case with the allegations related to Trump’s dealings with Zelensky, the first problem with the probes against Netanyahu is that his actions were far from unique—although less successful than similar actions by other politicians.

In just one striking example of the inherent bias of the charges against Netanyahu, consider the behavior of the prosecutors in relation to Blue and White Party co-chairman and Yesh Atid Party leader Yair Lapid and his relations with Mozes and Elovich.

Today, post-election wranglings in Israel over governing coalitions are guided by varied assessments of the likelihood that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit will indict Netanyahu. During the campaign leading up to the April elections, Mandelblit cast legal norms distinguishing politics from law to the seven winds. He took the unprecedented step of announcing that pending the outcome of Netanyahu’s pre-indictment hearing, which is scheduled for this week, he intends to indict the premier on bribery and breach of trust charges over his dealings with Mozes and Elovich.

Now, as Netanyahu prepares for his pre-indictment hearing, the prosecution has leaked its intent to indict Netanyahu by mid-November. In other words, they have no intention to consider Netanyahu’s defense claims. The outcome is preordained.

For many Israelis, Pelosi’s decision to begin an impeachment investigation parallels moves by Mandelblit and State Attorney Shai Nitzan to fast-track the probes against Netanyahu. But the opposite is the case.

Pelosi’s impeachment bid is a sign that America’s legal system and indeed its democracy is far healthier than Israel’s.

For nearly two years, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his partisan investigators spent millions of dollars on a massive and barely veiled bid to find a legal excuse to oust Trump. But in the end, they failed. The evidence of collusion between Trump and his campaign and Russia simply wasn’t to be found.

Mueller could have kept going. The media wanted him to. The Democrats wanted him to. But after feeding the media prejudicial leaks against Trump and aggressively prosecuting Manafort and other Trump officials on unrelated issues, Mueller ran out of steam. Although in his final report Mueller tried to provide Democrats with the means to continue the Russia probe on the political level, he closed down his investigation and went home. U.S. practice doesn’t permit the indictment of a sitting president. But even if it allowed for indictments, the materials he had assembled were too weak to justify an indictment.

In other words, Mueller walked his prosecutors to the brink of political interference, and then he walked them back. He did not replace politicians with prosecutors.

Until Mueller submitted his report, Pelosi used his ongoing probe to fend off pressure from the increasingly powerful radical members of her Democratic caucus to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump. Since then, Pelosi argued, rightly, that impeachment proceedings require a huge political investment and hold little chance for success. Most Americans oppose impeaching Trump. The Republicans control the Senate. If the House votes to impeach Trump, chances of getting the two-thirds majority of senators required to convict an impeached president and remove him from office are effectively nonexistent.

Unfortunately for Pelosi, the Democratic base—including the media and the empowered radical faction of her Democratic caucus—have become deaf to reason. According to a Politico poll, whereas 70% of Democrats support impeachment, only 37% of the public does. The likes of Reps. Anastasia Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, like The New York Times and The Washington Post, live in an echo chamber. Members of the echo chamber are so cut off from those outside it that just as they cannot fathom anyone objecting to socialism, so they cannot imagine that anyone supports Trump or accepts the validity of the 2016 election results.

It is hard to know how the impeachment proceedings will play out, but a likely scenario is that the proceedings will damage Democrats more than they will damage Trump.

This then brings us back to Israel.

Like Pelosi and her colleagues, Blue and White leaders Benny Gantz and Lapid and their colleagues on the left claim that the very fact that Netanyahu is under investigation renders him illegitimate. They refuse to form a unity government with Likud unless Netanyahu is first ousted as Likud leader.

But unlike Pelosi, Gantz and Lapid don’t need to make their claims themselves. Lapid, whose ministers gave preferential treatment to Yedioth through government advertising contracts and received glowing coverage in the paper, does not have to argue the case for impeaching Netanyahu. He stands behind the ostensibly objective state prosecutions.

Pelosi’s decision to open impeachment proceedings against Trump despite the great political risk involved going into an election year indicates that the radical faction has swallowed the Democratic Party. But more importantly, her move is a testament to the abiding power and fortitude of American democracy. The difference between the situation in Israel, where prosecutors happily abuse their legal power for transparently political aims, and the United States, where politically motivated prosecutors backed away from the brink and compelled politicians to take over their political investigations, is the difference between a flailing democracy and a resilient one.

Caroline Glick is an award-winning columnist and author of “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.”

Photo from the White House at Wikimedia Commons