What does “ ‘worse than Watergate’ mean?” asks Andrew C. McCarthy at The Hill, about the ex-prez’s description of Special Counsel John Durham’s findings. If “the Obama administration tasked the FBI and CIA to help the Democrats’ 2016 candidate, Hillary Clinton, by framing the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, as a mole for the Kremlin” and if “top government officials” dishonestly promoted the “Trump collusion with Russia” narrative, “we might have something that was worse than Watergate.” Yet the “real-life scandal, established by stunning revelations in a court filing by” Durham, only involves officials who “were naifs,” as “Clinton rolled them, in Durham’s version.” That may be “hard to swallow,” but “Trump supporters” with “great expectations” here “are going to be deeply disappointed.”

It’s not “whether but why” the president is “hemorrhaging” black support, notes Jason L. Riley at The Wall Street Journal. “An NBC News poll last month found that black support” for him “had dropped to 64%” from 83%. Biden’s response has been “identity politics” yet “recent polling suggests . . . racial pandering no longer works like it used to.” This is partly due to black success: “As the black middle class grows . . . the solidarity politics we see among black voters will inevitably start to wane.” And “the economic gains we experienced prior to the pandemic were real, and no one benefited more than blacks did.” Republicans ought to “talk about it nonstop between now and November.”

“Governments across the globe have taken extreme measures over the past two years to combat COVID,” Graham Shearer observes for First Things. But “a perpetual state of crisis cannot be a stable basis for civil government.” Crucially, “Governments that were quick to impose restrictions have been reticent to rescind them, and many measures may not be rescinded at all.” And the protests in Canada show “that government authority and legitimacy are more fragile than we ordinarily suppose.” Indeed, “governments who claim that circumstances require extraordinary measures may find that their citizens also take extraordinary measures.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act to strike “peaceful Canadians engaging in legal protest is a stretch of epic and frightening proportions,” blasts Meghan Murphy at Spiked. Using it against “tens of thousands of happy Canadians, peacefully protesting by playing street hockey, singing the national anthem, dancing, barbequeing and setting up bouncy castles for kids, as we see in Ottawa today,” is “nothing less than an attack on democracy.” Trudeau won office “as a man who celebrates ‘tolerance’, ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’, ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty.’ ” But operating “with quasi-dictatorial powers” in fact makes him “an authoritarian.” Canadians were “promised a return to normal if they followed the rules, so follow the rules they did.” Two years later, normal’s nowhere in sight — and Trudeau won’t tolerate complaints.

“The trucker protests have gone a long way toward demonstrating the limits of the progressive capacity to represent the interests and outlook of the working class,” warns Damon Linker at The Week. The left believes “the movement of history tends toward the goals progressives favor and that popular protest is a kind of fuel powering that salutary change.” So lashing out at these protests isn’t just hypocrisy: “They’re lashing out against the fact that some of their most fundamental social and political assumptions are no longer valid,” that “those toward the bottom of the sociopolitical hierarchy railing against systemic injustices . . . may actually prefer policies and goals normally associated with the right.” And pretending the protesters are just deceived “will contribute to the impression that progressives have no interest in rethinking long-settled but increasingly questionable pieties.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board