President Trump is going to “use the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries” — or so warns the Times in a dispatch called “If Trump Wins.” The idea is that the 45th president is readying a “radical reshaping of American government.” It includes prosecuting his adversaries, “increasing presidential power,” “upending” America’s economic policies, “retreating militarily” from Europe, and deploying troops to “Democratic-run cities.” 

It looks to us like the Gray Lady has come down with an epic case of the fantods over the prospect that if Trump wins he might do what they have been doing. A case in point is the business about prosecuting his adversaries. Isn’t that precisely what the Democrats, writ large, have been doing against Trump? It’s hard to avoid that conclusion amid the myriad indictments against the former, and possibly future, president, by state and federal Democratic officials.

Feature, say, the Times’s concern that Trump would “use the powers of the presidency to seek vengeance on his perceived foes.” What, though, does the Times think Jack Smith has been doing since Mr. Biden’s attorney general appointed him to investigate Trump? It certainly didn’t go unnoticed by these columns that Mr. Smith was sicced on Trump but three days after Trump’s announcement that he was seeking re-election to the White House.

At the time, the Grey Lady explained that appointing Mr. Smith to pursue Trump was meant to “theoretically” shield the Justice Department, and by extension Mr. Biden, from the appearance of a “partisan attack” on a political rival. Even so, the Times explained, any final decision on whether to indict Trump “would still rest with Mr. Garland and the department’s top leaders.” That includes the head of the executive branch, Mr. Biden.

In sum, the political dimension cannot be ignored. Similar concerns apply when elected Democrats, like the district attorneys of New York and Fulton counties — and the New York attorney general — launch prosecutions against a presidential candidate. That’s even trickier when the candidate is a member of an opposing political party. These prosecutors have done little to allay concerns about political motives — and even help from the White House.

On that head, what did the lawyer hired to help prosecute District Attorney Fani Willis’s case against Trump, Nathan Wade, discuss with White House officials — and the January 6 committee — in the leadup to the indictment? The House Judiciary Committee says it has “serious concerns about the degree of improper coordination among politicized actors,” including the White House, in the prosecution of “President Biden’s chief political opponent.”

Looking more broadly, Mr. Biden often appears to take an ends justifies the means approach when it comes to the Constitution. He defies rulings by the Supreme Court in matters like student loan amnesty and affirmative action and derides its justices as “not normal.” Under the guise of combating “misinformation,” he has launched an online censorship campaign that a federal judge has compared to the “Ministry of Truth” in Orwell’s “1984.”

Taken together, the Democrats appear to be exploiting fears about a prospective Trump win appear to justify what the Times calls “extraordinary pre-emptive actions.” In the Times’s telling, a kind of “resistance” is brewing among an “emerging coalition” of “Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups,” and even “ex-Republicans” who have “already started” a campaign to undermine or thwart the agenda of the GOP front-runner. 

“Trump has made clear that he’ll disregard the law and test the limits of our system,” says the head of what the Times calls a “nonpartisan democracy watchdog organization,” Joanna Lydgate. “What we’re staring down is extremely dark,” she frets. In their zeal to protect democracy from what Mr. Biden and his camarilla depict as an existential threat, though, is America’s constitutional democracy being targeted by the Democrats themselves?