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The headline on the New York Times story of ex-President Trump’s indictment is a wonderfully unintentional guide to the topsy-turveydom of American life in the Biden era: “US Justice System Put on Trial as Trump Denounces the Rule of Law”. To start with, the front-page piece is not a simple factual report—“Trump Indicted on Thirty-Seven Counts”, say—but “news analysis” which signalled Schumpeter’s definition of Marxism (“preaching in the garb of analysis”) even before Wokedom tightened its grip on US journalism.
It’s worse now, of course, and relentless too. An accompanying report inside warns in another headline that “Trump Backers Unleash Wave of Violent Threats, Worrying Some Analysts”. The worries of analysts don’t usually make it into headlines, and we don’t learn about the reactions of “other” analysts. Presumably, if quoted in the NYT, those complacent fellows would argue that the threats—one of which is the simple word “Retribution”—were religious and military metaphors used by all parties at times but, when employed by Republicans, more worrying than the actual if “largely peaceful” riots of the Left.
John O’Sullivan appears in every Quadrant.
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To revert to the front-page headline, though, Trump did not in fact “denounce the rule of law” unless every indicted man who proclaims his innocence is held to be denouncing it. He said that law enforcement had been “hijacked” by the Democrats, including elected Democratic prosecutors, to take out the most formidable opponent they face in next year’s presidential election, namely himself.
In a few paragraphs I’ll deal with the thirty-seven charges levelled against the former President by the Special Prosecutor looking into, inter alia, his retention of classified national security documents in insecure conditions in his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. These are serious charges and pose a real threat, namely a long prison sentence. But his claim that the Democrats had hijacked law enforcement to take him out of the 2024 election is largely true.
Largely? Well, Trump is probably not the most formidable challenger Biden could face next year. He may be the strongest candidate in the GOP primaries, but his negatives are so high with the full electorate that he would probably lose to the President where a challenger like Florida’s governor, Ron de Santis, would enter the race as the favourite.
There’s even a theory that the Democrats see the various legal challenges to Trump as a way to weaken but not destroy him electorally and thus more or less guarantee their victory. Those calculations are a little too clever and “nice” for comfort, and as we shall see, they risk creating more public sympathy for the man they hate and fear most. But the risk is real because there is no doubt that Democrats have not only weaponised the justice system to “get” Trump but have even boasted publicly that they would do so.
Both Letitia James, the New York State Attorney General, and Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, campaigned on their determination to charge the former President with crimes of which they had no evidence initially. Legally speaking, pursuing people rather than investigating known crimes is highly dubious, and it usually means that prosecutors are engaged in “fishing” expeditions in order to find something, anything, that they can pin on their target. And Trump is the very beau ideal of what the novelist Tom Wolfe called “the Great White Defendant” whom every Democrat prosecutor hopes to land, especially in Manhattan and Albany.
Sadly for Bragg, however, after six years of investigation, when he launched a thirty-four-count felony against his Great White Whale, even strong critics of Trump criticised the thinness of the case. “I believe President Trump’s character and conduct make him unfit for office. Even so, I believe the New York prosecutor has stretched to reach felony criminal charges in order to fit a political agenda,” said Senator Mitt Romney, who had twice voted to impeach Trump—votes which, if the impeachment had succeeded, would have prevented Trump from running for President in 2024.
Romney’s further remarks were, however, even more significant: “The prosecutor’s overreach sets a dangerous precedent for criminalising political opponents and damages the public’s faith in our justice system.” That amounts to an endorsement of Trump’s criticism of Bragg’s legal practices by a leading American public figure who can’t be suspected of political sympathy for him.
Much the same might be said of Letitia James’s legal pursuit of Trump’s business practices which began in 2019 and which so far has produced one successful prosecution of an accountant in the Trump organisation—a modest return on a four-year investigation.
Bragg and James received a consolation prize of sorts when Trump was found to have been guilty of sexual abuse in a civil case brought by a woman who claimed he had raped her in a New York city department store changing room twenty-seven years ago. The case could be brought only because the Democrats in New York had raised the time limit (the statute of limitations) for bringing such cases; the mixed verdict—he was found not to have raped the plaintiff—casts doubt on her overall story; and the case is on appeal.
The results in all these cases suggest that the usual presumption of innocence is weak and the standards of evidence flexible when Trump is concerned. Prosecutors are searching desperately for crimes (to the point in Bragg’s case of making them up) in order to validate their suspicion that Trump is a criminal. He may, of course, be the greatest villain unhung—which is what the progressive half of America believes—but that’s not how law enforcement should be conducted.
That sceptical judgment cannot be made of the charges of mishandling national security classified documents brought most recently by the Special Prosecutor and Biden’s Justice Department. Some of the best legal minds—Andrew McCarthy, a former prosecutor now writing for National Review, and William Barr, Trump’s former Attorney General—believe that these are serious charges, apparently supported by good evidence, carrying heavy prison sentences, and that therefore Trump is in serious peril. Along with them, others express surprise that Trump has put himself in this peril so recklessly when he gained very little by keeping the documents and could have safeguarded himself by quite simple steps. The mystery is essentially one of Trump’s personality. In almost any normal case, however, the former President would now be headed for prison.
Why might that not inevitably transpire? One obvious possibility is that once Trump’s lawyers get around to dissecting the prosecution case, they’ll find weaknesses not easily apparent even to experienced lawyers, let alone innocents-at-law like me. For instance, one commentator sympathetic to Trump, Michael Walsh, points out that using the Espionage Act as a basis for charges might be a good political move (because it seemingly validates the discredited Russiagate scandal) but a bad legal one. The Espionage Act—a First World War measure—is rarely prosecuted; it probably requires evidence that Trump intended to transmit the documents to a foreign power—for which there’s no evidence; and the judge in the Pentagon Papers case threw it out.
If that happens in this trial, the main basis for prosecution would be the laws on the safeguarding of presidential papers on which Trump’s lawyers could have a field day. I can scarcely believe this but I’m told that one federal ruling they might cite is something known as the “Clinton socks precedent” which allegedly held that when President Clinton placed confidential documents in his sock drawer, he automatically declassified them. We’ll see if that precedent protects a Republican President too.
And, finally, this trial will be a jury trial. The judge chosen to preside over it seems to be one who is not hostile to Trump. A friendly judge can quite honourably ensure that the selection of jurors is not biased against the defendant, especially in Florida where the jury pool will start out as quite balanced. And you can never be certain how a jury will decide. And if he is acquitted, Trump will be a strong favourite for the 2024 presidential election. All the legal attacks on him would redound to his credit. He would look like—he would be!—a wronged man unjustly pursued.
Let’s assume, however, that Trump is found guilty. At that point a grave national crisis would be threatened. Trump and his partisans would argue, with more than a little justice, that he had been found guilty of crimes more or less identical with crimes committed by people on the Democratic side of politics, notably Hillary Clinton, who were not even charged with their offences. Legally speaking, that is irrelevant: if you are found guilty of a crime, it’s no defence at all to argue or even prove that others have committed the same crime and escaped scot-free. Most criminals do escape scot-free, but that unfortunate fact can’t be a defence for criminals who are caught. Otherwise, criminals would never be punished and there would be no deterrence for crime.
Politically speaking, however, it would be a different matter entirely. Half the country would see his conviction as unsafe and vindictive. I won’t predict the social and political consequences of that in case the New York Times accuses me of unleashing a wave of violent threats and alarming analysts.
But I will say that Donald Trump was quite right to denounce not the rule of law but how law is selectively misapplied by Democratic prosecutors: to give up enforcing laws they dislike, to release dangerous criminals onto the streets without bail, to punish their political opponents and reward their friends, and to use their regulatory and prosecutorial powers to censor opinions they dislike and bankrupt those who express them.
Donald Trump is big enough to look after himself. What about the rest of us?
What about the rest of us, indeed!
The machinery of corruption is fully embedded now in the power structures of the United States. This was demonstrated not only by the rigging of the election in which the senile puppet Joe Biden came to power, but also in the national ‘pandemic’ during which this occurred. The environmental lawyer and anti-vaxxer RFK is now running for President in spite of the fact that both his uncle (President Kennedy) and his father (Senatory Kennedy) were assassinated (he believes by the CIA). Those murders are among a list of major events in modern US history that are apparently connected with corrupt state actors, including the unaccountable failure to defend Pearl Harbour, and the demolition of the Twin Towers on 9/11 (the latter clearly not carried out by the terrorists to whom it was attributed). Along with Trump, RFK appears to be an honest man in grave danger of being consumed by the wrath of a deluded establishment – people whose actions evidently flow from an unrestrained lust for power and an utter disregard for human life.
So what is going on Australia? Socialists now control every level of government (federal, state and local) as well as the education system and most major corporations in the service sector. They are committed to a simplistic, outdated ideology and are clinging to Enlightenment myths (the noble savage, the worship of Nature, the intellectual supremacy of science) that have long since passed their use-by date. For years now they have been flexing their muscles with tyrannical ‘anti-discrimination’ laws, ready to be weaponised against their ideological enemies, especially Christians. They are setting up a permanent federal truth commission that will determine whether what you and I say is ‘misinformation’. They have at their disposal a total surveillance system that is able to track the movements and communications of every citizen. They are also able on pretext of any ’emergency’ (which in their language is any demonstration that challenges totalitarian control) to mobilise an irresistable militarised police force.
What will happen to us, do you think, under these circumstances?
In a recent podcast a US paramedic described being called to a Covid vaccination centre, where a woman had collapsed on being injected. Attempts at resuscitaion failed and she was taken, presumed dead, to the nearest Emergency Room. The paramedic, as he left the scene, noted that everyone in the queue for the ‘jab’ was still awaiting their turn. None had left the line. We need to get out of the line.
The way they are going after Trump in America has a parallel here with the way they are still going after Morrison.
The left won’t rest until they frame conservatives as evil, not just a different view of society and government.
padraic
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An astute observation that commentators and the media have missed.
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Why?
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They don’t want to see it. It’s in the interests of so many stakeholders to blame Scott Morrison for the Coalition’s election loss.
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One not uncommon narrative is that Labor were able to win partly because Scott Morrison was so desperately unpopular in the electorate. That is simply untrue according to the polls. Scott Morrison may have been extremely unpopular among commentators but he clearly led Anthony Albanese by a substantial margin in nearly every single preferred PM poll before the last election.
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Blaming Scott Morrison helps take the heat off the Coalition to avoid admitting policy failures and developing policies we need. Policies which actually might get them elected and improve our country. And there’s plenty of scope for that.
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In fact Scott Morrison’s leadership pulled off the last Coalition win even though they went to that election with a policy vacuum for the future – relying on Bill Shorten’s Labor opposition to frighten the horses – which they did so helpfully.
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Peter Dutton is too inept to do what Scott Morrison did and certainly totally incapable of developing alternative viable policies.
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So the continued focus on Scott Morrison conveniently helps take the heat off Peter Dutton’s inept leadership.
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He will never achieve the preferred PM poll figures Scott Morrison did. He’s woefully behind Anthony Albanese as preferred PM and the Coalition has astoundingly polled below the 70 year low it got at the last election. Under Peter Dutton’s leadership Labor has substantially increased its primary vote.
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Labor and the left generally would have to be over the moon with Peter Dutton as Liberal leader. He stands no chance of winning a general election – ever. As well as taking the Liberal vote below the 70 year low at the last election he’s lost the first Liberal seat in a byelection since 1920. And there will be more to come. The left would like him to stay as Liberal leader forever.
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No wonder so many are relentlessly blaming Scott Morrison. It’s in so many stakeholders’ interests to do so.
John O’Sullivan,
Great to see that Quadrant has balanced writers who do not automatically decompose into Trump Derangement Syndrome types or the other extreme of MAGA people.
You wrote ‘prosecutors are engaged in “fishing” expeditions in order to find something, anything, that they can pin on their target’. This is quite similar to the recently popular but questionable method of Science dubbed “P-Hacking”.
Lawrence Krauss wrote in mid-2022 “In American laboratories and universities, the spirit of Trofim Lysenko has suddenly been woke”. The woke malady might worsen before it dies. A catalyst to help speed that fate is, by past record, Donald Trump. Geoff S
But, but, let’s not forget that in Donald Trump’s case (as decreed by Nancy Pelosi) in a court of law it will be up to Donald to prove his innocence, not the other way round. One rule for all but another special one for Donald.
Neither Trump nor De Santis could win the next election because neither of them are focussed on getting fake ballots eliminated. It is such a massive task that ‘now’ is too late for 2024. The patricians will simply never allow them into the fold. Unless the GOP puts forward someone like Halley, who is already one of them, then the US is stuck with a very bad Democrat option for the next few years.
Still, they do fear Trump and his supporters – that much is obvious. I think they are more worried about his supporters fighting back, or perhaps that is what they are attempting to incite. It is of course an unfounded fear given that they are peace loving people, but they are projecting their own motives onto them.
There’s no question the Justice system is being weaponised against Donald Trump. It started happening from the moment he was elected President in 2016. The latest accusation that Donald Trump is a serious security risk because he held onto classified documents is farcial. (And of course Joe Biden also has been accused of doing that as Vice President but not prosecuted).
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Given all the millions of dollars of resources and the myriad of investigating organisations used in all that time it’s surprising they’ve been unable to pin anything on Donald Trump that would lead to jail time. You’d think with that level of effort and time they’d be able to convict a Saint of at least some minor jailable offence.
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And Donald Trump is certainly no Saint. Arguably no Saint would be electable. Turning the other cheek to today’s earthly totalitarian leaders would be widely recognised as pretty ineffective and dangerously risky. Perhaps even worse than a having senile President.
The systematic weaponising of a justice system against a political opponent is pretty standard practice in totalitarian and semi totalitarian countries but it’s more unusual in the free world.
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So why has it been used against Donald Trump in particular on such an incredibly grand level? The unrelenting legal campaign against him has been going since 2016 when he was first elected. It’s involved the commitment of many millions of dollars and a myriad of Justice system organisations at all levels in a concerted effort over a long time to convict Donald Trump of a jailable offence of some kind.
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The explanation implied in this article is that his Democrat political opponents don’t want him to win the Presidency. But further to that this time they want him to nevertheless actually win the Republican primaries because the Democrat’s candidate can beat him in the presidential election.
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You’d think that’s hardly enough to cause the systematic weaponising of the Justice system on the level it’s been used against Donald Trump. The latest legal actions against him seem simply the most recent extension of a long legal attack on Donald Trump personally since 2016.
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It’s plausible there are deeper reasons for this incredible weaponising of the Justice system against Donald Trump and to understand those deeper reasons one needs to look at why and how a political outsider like Donald Trump came to be President in the first place.
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Donald Trump virtually came from nowhere in an established political sense to be President. He even had past Republican Presidents and senior Republican Party members refusing to endorse him. Yet he was successful. Why?
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Donald Trump was unlikely to be a product of division and hatred among ordinary citizens as many left commentators like to argue. And he wasn’t the cause of division. He was arguably a product of the perceived disenfranchisement of large sections of the US population by the combined Democrat and Republican establishment. Many people arguably felt neither party had represented them. (Low voter turnout generally is compatible with that).
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Donald Trump was seen as an answer to that by enough voters to get him elected President. He therefore represented a serious democratic risk to the established political system players on both sides of politics in the US at many levels.
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And he still does.
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Arguably this helps more plausibly explain the incredible weaponising of the Justice system against him.
Mitt Romney is not only “a leading American public figure who can’t be suspected of political sympathy for him”, but he’s a qualified lawyer who received his Juris Doctor degree cum laude for ranking in the top third of his law school class at Harvard, and was hopeful of becoming US Attorney-General but Trump chose otherwise.
Why would you weaponise the Justice system against Donald Trump if you thought he stood less chance of winning the presidency than Ron De Santis? Doing so would be a very logically questionable proposition.
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It’s almost like saying they are just trying to jail Donald Trump a little bit – not too much that he’ll lose the primaries but just enough to lose the presidential election. It doesn’t seem to make sense.
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If the Democrats believe Donald Trump is the candidate who gives the Democrats the best chance of retaining the Whitehouse why make things difficult for him in the lead up to the primaries? They’d want him to get the Republican nomination wouldn’t they?
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The answer is all to obvious. Donald Trump is the one the Democrats and the establishment fear most. If he wins he’s going to shake up the establishment and make it more effective. That’s what he does. He’s going to make the world a safer place.
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He won’t be a first time President this time. A man like Donald Trump will have learnt a lot that he’ll put to good use.
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I think he’s by no means a certainty or even the favourite to win the presidency but be stands a good chance of winning – far better than any other Republican contender. Warts and all he’ll do a good job for America and the world if he does win. I also thought all that in 2016 and wasn’t disappointed.
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Those taking action against him have overplayed their hand in weaponising the justice system against him. They’re gone really over the top in a totally unprecedented way.
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That will be made more and more obvious in paid advertisements and rallies during the long campaign when the message will get out better than it does now when there’s necessarily more reliance on a media biased against Donald Trump. A media which has arguably played a part in the weaponising process.
Thanks John for a very well put together piece, as usual.
Also, I couldn’t put my thoughts on Donald Trump and the next Presidential elections in the US any better than the last comment by Balanced Observation.
I know that if I was a US voting citizen he’d get my vote. It was a travesty that he wasn’t able to finish the job he started in his first term as he’d learnt so much, and taken and survived more punishment from all and sundry particularly the dominant left media, than any previous President, at least since WW11, & was much the stronger and wiser for it, in my view.
Both the US and us need him back now to do just that.
Thanks Peter Marriott.
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There’s a lot less recognition of the positive influence of Donald Trump’s former administration in Australia than in America. Thank goodness he still has a lot of support where it counts in the US, despite the incredible Justice system campaign waged against him relentlessly from the time he was first elected.
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Although the mainstream media in the US is strongly biased against him – unlike in Australia he has areas of the media in the US where he’s treated more fairly. It’s nearly Wall to wall anti Trump here. So it’s not altogether surprising Australians view him differently.
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Underlying the legal campaign waged against Donald Trump is the big worry he’s very hard to beat purely relying on the ballot box. But as I mentioned above there’s also probably more to it than that.
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The fact he has persevered and is still in contention – despite all that’s been thrown at him – shows the calibre of leader he is.
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As a candidate for President he’s a strong natural leader with a lot of experience at a high management level outside politics plus a full term in the highest political leadership job in the free world.
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In US polls, overwhelmingly those who voted him in as President, think he did a good job. Even with his warts and all, generally what they saw is what they got. That’s very unusual in politics anywhere.
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There wasn’t nearly the trouble with the free world’s main totalitarian enemies when he was in office. It doesn’t take much thinking to work that out either. A threat or a caution from Donald Trump as Commander in Chief of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force would carry a lot more weight than one from the current occupant of that post.
Each week I get an email in consequence of having a subscription to The Economist
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July 13th 2023
The weekly newsletter from The Economist
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Highlights from the latest issue
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Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief
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What would Donald Trump’s second presidency look like? A professional corps of America First populists are busy preparing for it. If they are successful, America will be left with a weakened state and an emperor-president wielding unchecked power
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Not an opinion, but a statement of alleged facts.
Subscription won’t be renewed!
lbloveday
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Thanks for letting us know this. We all should be trying to hold the media to account for this sort of thing. It’s not simply bias either – it’s intellectual dishonesty or worse.
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It’s incredible a respected publication has come to this. I used to subscribe to it too.
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It’s worth examining the specific claims to expose them for what they are. We should never let this sort of thing go unquestioned. But that’s happening everywhere today.
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Donald Trump didn’t govern like an emperor. He was elected to office following an election involving the America people. He was removed from office following an election of the people. He’s preparing to run for election by the people again. Emperors don’t do that.
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He’s been subject to more checks than any US President in living history. He’s had to face more investigations and legal actions than any other President.
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Arguably America was economically stronger under Donald Trump. It’s also arguable he made it stronger militarily. And stronger in the sense that he committed the US to no new war during his Presidency. There was no need to under his leadership. Ukraine for example was invaded before his Presidency and after it, not during it. That’s arguably a reflection of the power of his leadership and the fact he made the US and the free world stronger.
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The last points on a stronger America are true I believe but you could possibly debate them. However it’s certainly not a matter of fact beyond debate that America was weaker under Donald Trump as your email implies. But there’s nothing even debatable about the first two points on governing like an emperor or Donald Trump being unaccountable.
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Journalists are able to get away with this sort of thing all the time these days.
From this week’s Cover Story:
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Starts: Our cover this week is about the alarming plans being drawn up for Donald Trump’s second term.
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Ends: And so we opted for the red carpet—here being worked on by our cover artist. As a cover, it’s grainy and menacing. A grim-faced Mr Trump towers above his people. Victory is not joy, it is strife.
lbloveday
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Thanks for this info. Unfortunately it’s unsurprising to hear about it.
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Any sense of fair coverage and balance go out the window in the coverage of Donald Trump. It’s worse outside of the US.
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Your story of the cover reminds me of something I witnessed with the media. It brought home to me strongly that bias doesn’t even have to be in words. It can be purveyed destructively even in a picture in a publication.
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There was a public debate going on over an issue for an organisation I worked for. (The issue itself is irrelevant to my point). The media were present at a meeting to cover the issue – they’d opposed what the head of the organisation I worked for had proposed.
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At the meeting they took about 50 or more photos of my boss. The one that was splashed across the front page of the daily newspaper of my boss had him looking disheveled and asleep with his eyes closed. He wasn’t actually at all. It took 50 photos or more from various angles of him to get a photo which gave that impression. I’d wondered at the time why they took so many photos of him at the meeting. When I saw the front page of the newspaper the next day I realized why they had.
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Arguably this sort of thing has been done to Moira Deeming recently in the media here. Not as bad as with my boss but still arguably with the same idea in mind. It’s an old trick.
lbloveday
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Comprehensively disproving these sorts of claims in posts will get you censored today in most of the left media in Australia.
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It wouldn’t matter how respectful your post was or that your post abided completely with posting guidelines. The problem would be that you comprehensively disproved a journalist’s claim beyond doubt.
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It could get you banned altogether.
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The situation today is a lot worse than people generally realise.
The Economist, as far as I can determine, no longer allows comments.
It seems that in 2018 comments were restricted to selected articles; now it seems a blanket ban.
Thankfully I now have sufficient means that I do not have to hang this kind of non-news material on a nail in our toilet.