When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted former President Donald Trump for paying off a porn star over a one-night stand from 18 years ago, the cynical calculus of the liberal legal movement seemed obvious.
While ignoring rampant violent crimes against people and property, select Soros prosecutors would shatter centuries of legal precedent in a three-step plan.
First, Democratic DAs would indict Trump on either the most spurious of charges or by manipulating legal statutes beyond recognition during the Republican presidential primary, allowing Trump to ride billions of dollars in free media coverage and a custom-crafted narrative of victimhood to sweep the Republican primary. Then, after burying the former president under a mountain of legal bills, a string of criminal convictions would come right on time before the general election, issuing a fatal blow to a candidate softened by nearly two years of legal warfare.
But while this strategy indeed succeeded in catapulting Trump to the GOP nomination as well as bankrupting the RNC, it has one potentially fatal flaw: it may have ripped open Pandora’s box in a way that will come back to bite Democrats even more painfully than when Harry Reid nuked the judicial filibuster, and it may have done so without actually tanking Trump’s chances of beating President Joe Biden.
The liberal legal movement has thrown not just four rounds of criminal cases against Trump but also a bevy of civil cases ranging from E. Jean Carroll’s evidence-light allegation that Trump raped her nearly three decades ago to Letitia James’s appalling charge that Trump committed fraud despite failing to identify a single material victim of this alleged fraud. All in all, Trump’s PACs have spent some $50 million on his legal defenses, and thanks to the gross incompetence of Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee is in no great financial shape either, to put it mildly.
But the pain to the Republican pocketbook simply has not translated to better electoral odds for Democrats. If anything, the sheer volume of Trump trials and the fundamental unseriousness of most of them have led voters to tune out. One perfectly executed prosecution related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riots may have captured the consciences of swing voters. Instead, half a dozen trials scattered across claims of improperly storing classified documents and cash to a porn star distracted from the main event, and said main event — the Fulton County case, which was the only case with the potential to break through the noise — was botched from the start by rogue and corrupt prosecutor Fani Willis.
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While a slew of polling indicates that a crucial center of voters would indeed turn against Trump if he were actually convicted, it’s now fully possible that not one of these cases will reach a conclusion by Election Day. Without even pretending to be politically impartial, Trump’s prosecutors have all pleaded for expedited trials, but the right to a speedy trial exists for the sake of a defendant, not the state. In all likelihood, according to consistently and uniquely abysmal polling for Biden, 45 will beat 46, and if he doesn’t, Trump will claim that Democrats tried to steal the election from him as he alleged in 2020, but unlike in 2020, Trump would likely be right.
Unless Democrats fulfill their fever dream of Michelle Obama launching an eleventh-hour Hail Mary from Martha’s Vineyard, the party is stuck with the historically unpopular Biden and Kamala Harris. Unlike in 2020, when COVID backfired on Trump, and further financial or foreign policy travesty would only continue to depress Biden’s support. If Trump then does win the presidency, he will enter the Oval with permission for his Justice Department to prosecute and indict a former president for the second time in history.