The ongoing trial of previous President Donald J. Trump, promoted as a ‘criminal’ trial by some, has actually triggered much argument and discussion. Nevertheless, a closer examination exposes that the case versus Trump is doing not have in substance and benefit.

Partisan district attorney Alvin Bragg, more showman than lawman, alleges that a 2016 deal from the Trump Organization was stealthily classified in its accounting. Even if that dubious claim held true, it is just a misdemeanor offense whose statute of constraints went out long ago. So how is it that a felony trial is underway for an act that isn’t a felony, and is well outside the statute of restrictions?
As millions of Americans across the country– and the political spectrum– suspect, this entire misadventure is nothing more than a charade. Desperate to do something, anything, to shift the focus from President Joe Biden’s failures, Bragg has actually turned to prosecuting Trump just months before the election. He knows he is not likely to win a conviction, but this case isn’t about justice; it’s about interruption. That is how we get to where we are now. That is how we have a criminal program trial of a previous– and most likely future– president of the United States, right at the opening of the general-election season.

Often things are precisely as they appear, and in those cases, we have an obligation to specify the apparent. So let us acknowledge what is taking place here: this prosecution is an act of lawfare, the purposeful perversion of the law and its processes to target, separate, and persecute a particular individual– and not at all coincidentally, disenfranchise the 10s of millions of Americans who might make him president once again.
One may argue that Bragg is exceedingly meticulous in his pursuit of justice. But one need just look at how he administers “justice” in nearly every other sphere of his jurisdiction to see his brazen partisanship. Although the Manhattan district attorney infamously declared that his workplace will not prosecute specific criminal offenses, his two-tiered notion of justice recommends that Trump will have the book tossed at him. One might likewise argue that Bragg’s timing is pure coincidence and unrelated to the nationwide election cycle. However the district attorney has had the evidence for almost eight years, and only now chosen to prosecute. An incorrect seriousness and a bogus conscientiousness betray the truth of the thing.
Alvin Bragg isn’t the sole perpetrator here. Even as he pursues the criminal case against Trump, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who ran for workplace in 2018 on the promise that she would “get Trump,” has pursued– effectively to date– a civil case versus him. That case is equally contrived and equally political, but however deeply destructive in having protected a fine of such preposterous (and efficiently unpayable) size that break with sense and precedent alike. This monstrous $455 million fine, considered by lots of constitutional experts as an infraction of the Eighth Amendment, was ultimately stayed by the New York Appellate Division.

However– and this can not be overstated– Bragg and James are merely instruments in a bigger collaborated effort to impoverish and prison the former president. All roads lead back to the United States Department of Justice and to the Oval Office, where Biden, through Attorney General Merrick Garland and Special Counsel Jack Smith, is hurrying to prosecute Trump before the 2024 presidential election. Taken in combination, we see what this is really all about: a grand scheme to keep Trump off the tally– due to the fact that Biden knows that he can not beat him in a reasonable fight. Remember, every day the former president invests in court and each dollar spent on legal costs is money and time not spent campaigning.
For all this, the higher sin of Bragg, James, and the whole progressive inner circle is not that they attack the previous president, nor even that they assault Americans, but that they assault the law. Law in the American system is expected to be the system of justice, a surpassing good implied for nothing else. It is not a plaything of powerholders, nor an arena of gamesmanship for political benefit. To pervert it in the ways we see now is a direct attack upon the American system. In lower democracies, where the custom of corruption is robust and the abuse of the law is a simple expectation, the civic remedy is merely to confer prosecutorial immunity to any elected officeholder. We haven’t done that in America since, for centuries, we relied on the device of the law and, therefore, believed that no male was above it.

However when the law serves injustice, there is no law– and the consequences are unforeseeable. The benefits of the case against President Donald J. Trump are nonexistent, but its consequences could be serious. Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and the whole mate behind them are betting they can perform a procedure end-run on the American individuals writ big, and get away with it. It is significant hubris, monstrous in its reach and aspiration– and it will meet the end that hubris constantly does.