It was a plan born out of desperation and besotted with fantasy. Trap Donald Trump and drown him in a swamp of legal difficulties, which would serve two purposes. First, it would tie the former president up in a series of ever-expanding court cases, preventing him from campaigning.
And second, it would finally — finally, once and for all — rip the mask off of Donald Trump and give voters the opportunity to clap their hands to their foreheads and exclaim, "A-Ha! We get it now! Trump is bad. We can't vote for him. Joe Biden must save us from this destroyer of democracy."
That's an exaggerated but completely accurate analysis of what the left was trying to accomplish with this series of indictments against the former president. The court cases are not about "justice." Any five-year-old can see that. They are about winning the 2024 presidential election. And leftists are willing to do it at any cost.
I don't know if Trump violated the law in trying to challenge the 2020 election. The law will eventually have its way with him, and he will be judged guilty or innocent of the crimes for which he's been indicted.
But the pathetic belief that a guilty verdict will start a stampede for Joe Biden and the Democrats in November 2024 and destroy Trump and the Republicans is beyond silly. It's moronic. It flies in the face of every poll that's been released since the indictments were handed down. It ignores the results of the GOP primaries. It reveals an extraordinary ignorance on the part of Trump's most vociferous and rabid critics — an ignorance born of elitist snobbery and effete coastal intolerance.
And now, as the rubber begins to meet the road in Trump's four criminal trials, something entirely mundane and commonplace has happened: postponements, legal maneuvers, and that damnable constitutional requirement that everyone — even Donald Trump — deserves a fair trial.
But, as of now, the wave of prosecutions don’t seem destined to deliver the kind of legal accountability that Trump’s investigators promised — or the devastating political blow to Trump’s presidential prospects that has animated his detractors since the cases were announced with great fanfare over a five-month span last year.
That’s because Trump has benefited enormously from a pileup of postponements. After a pair of delays this week in Georgia and Florida, the most likely scenario for 2024 is that the only trial that Trump will face before the election is the ongoing one in Manhattan: the hush money case, which many lawyers view as the least serious of the four, both in terms of the severity of the alleged wrongdoing and the prospect of prison time.
And if that scenario comes to pass, Trump’s critics will be deprived of the teaching moment they have long hoped for: some methodical public airing of the former president’s gravest misdeeds that would convince some swath of Trump supporters to rule out supporting him.
“I do think people had too high hopes for these cases to take the place of grass-roots organization and self-education and voting rights and getting people to the polls and basically having a more fundamental and a real conversation about what we are facing now in under 200 days,” said University of Baltimore law professor Kimberly Wehle. “I just thought courts were the last thing standing.”
"The last thing standing" for what? They're not even trying to hide the real purpose of the criminal trials. It's lawfare writ large and in neon lights.
Still not convinced? How about airing testimony and other evidence from the grand jury to "expose Trump" and enrage the voters, motivating them to march to the polls and destroy Donald Trump?
“It delays the trial on the one hand but, on the other hand, that could be the opportunity for some of the government’s evidence, the meticulous work that [special counsel] Jack Smith did in front of the grand jury, that could soon become something that Americans are conversant with. We have an opportunity to see more of the evidence against Donald Trump,” former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance said on MSNBC.
I don't care if the devil himself is being tried. Politics should have no place in the proceedings. And the prosecutions are treading dangerously close to using the law to reorder politics in the United States.
Just who is it trying to "destroy democracy"?
