Marc Thiessen, syndicated columnist

WASHINGTON — The objective of the Democrat-run House Jan. 6 select committee is clear: to make sure Donald Trump is never elected president again. So why are Democrats doing everything in their power to ensure that Trump wins back the White House in 2024?

They chose Joe Biden as their nominee precisely because he presented himself as an inoffensive, genial moderate who was least likely to drive away swing voters wary of the Democrats’ leftward turn. But instead of governing as a centrist and uniter, as he promised, Biden has become captive to his party’s progressive wing. His leftward lurch is providing no safe harbor for voters who don’t like Trump but also don’t like the left’s agenda. It has also unleashed a series of catastrophes that has left him less popular around the 500-day mark of his presidency than any modern president before him.

Biden says today’s GOP “isn’t your grandfather’s Republican Party.” Well, this isn’t your grandfather’s Democratic Party, either. In just a few decades, we’ve gone from a Democratic president who promised that “the era of big government is over” to a Democratic president who tried to enact the highest sustained levels of federal spending since World War II while collecting more tax revenue as a share of the economy than at almost any point in the past century. That’s not what Americans voted for in 2020.

One of Biden’s first acts as president was to pass a $1.9 trillion social spending bill disguised as covid relief, which helped unleash the worst inflation in more than 40 years. Don’t take my word for it. Post contributing columnist Lawrence H. Summers, who served as director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, warned in February 2021 that Biden’s plan would “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” And former Obama administration Treasury official Steven Rattner recently explained that Biden’s plan “overstimulated this economy” by “putting too much money in people’s pockets, which created a lot of this inflation.” Indeed, Rattner told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” things would have been even worse if Biden had succeeded in passing his Build Back Better social spending bill. “In an ironic way, you almost have to thank Joe Manchin for blocking that,” Rattner said of the Democratic senator of West Virginia, “because $6.5 trillion of spending in this economy would make these [inflation] numbers look small.”

That’s not all. Biden’s war on fossil fuels helped drive gas prices to record highs, while putting America at risk of widespread power outages because his radical green policies mean we might not have enough power to get through the summer heat wave. His radical immigration policies have helped unleash the worst border crisis in U.S. history. And the flood of illegal drugs surging across the southern border, together with Democratic soft-on-crime policies, helped fuel the worst crime wave in many cities since the 1990s. Never have Americans been confronted with so many failures of big government in so short a time.

Biden’s serial catastrophes are creating the perfect conditions for a Trump comeback. Democrats know it and are starting to panic. The New York Times reports that many party members now see Biden “as an anchor that should be cut loose in 2024.” Instead of blaming the disasters his left-wing policies unleashed, they blame his failure to pass even more “big-ticket legislation on signature Democratic issues” for his unpopularity — as if more spending leading to more inflation would have made him more popular.

Wrong. The problem is Biden’s failure to deliver on the central promise of his campaign, which was to restore normalcy, reach across the aisle, compromise and unite the country behind a moderate, bipartisan agenda. Americans voted for Biden expecting him to hew a centrist course, not to impose a radical progressive agenda on the nation. Unless Democrats are ready to change those policies and move to the center, getting rid of Biden won’t make a difference.

But Democrats seem unwilling to do that. Instead, they are focusing on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to re-toxify Trump for the electorate. Never mind that the Senate already held bipartisan hearings and issued a bipartisan report on the events of that day, in addition to Trump’s impeachment hearings and trial. The Democrat-run committee, by holding its first prime-time hearing on the Capitol riot last week, sent the American people a clear signal: Democrats consider this the single most important issue facing the country — more important than inflation, record gas prices, the border catastrophe, the crime wave or the baby formula shortage. Americans can be forgiven for asking: Why are these people rehashing Jan. 6 when I have to choose between filling my gas tank and feeding my family?

The answer is: Because they want to remind voters how much they hate Trump. Sorry, but that won’t be enough when every visit to the gas station and grocery store reminds them why they dislike Biden. If Democrats change their candidate without changing their policies, then they are paving the way for the 45th president to become the 47th.

Follow Marc A. Thiessen on Twitter, @marcthiessen.