Victor Davis Hanson: 'Fall of the House of Presidential Persecutions'

MUST-READ:

What will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes? https://t.co/At0p6ATlvW

— Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) May 13, 2024

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

None of the five civil and criminal cases currently lodged against former President Donald Trump have ever had merit. They were all predicated on using the law to injure his re-election candidacy—given a widespread derangement syndrome among the left and a fear they cannot entrust a Trump/Biden election to the people.

These criminal and civil trials are merely the continuation of extra-legal efforts of the last eight years to destroy a presidential candidate in lieu of opposing him in transparent elections.

As such, the current lawfare joins the Mueller investigation of the Russian-collusion hoax. It is a continuation of the laptop disinformation caper and the “51 intelligence authorities” who lied about its Russian origins. It logically follows from the two impeachments, the Senate trial of Trump as a private citizen, and states’ efforts to remove him from their ballots.

...Given these egregious violations of the law, abject political bias, conflicts of interest, asymmetrical application of the law, and manipulations of the statutes of limitations, the public has slowly grown incensed. They rightly conclude that the lawfare is a left-wing coordinated effort to destroy candidate Trump by exhausting him physically and psychologically in five separate cases at the height of the campaign season, bankrupting him with what will likely be $1 billion in legal fees and fines, silencing him with gag orders, defaming him with salacious and sensational but irrelevant court testimonies, and keeping him off the campaign trail.

And now? The sheer preposterousness has resulted in two unexpected developments. One, the more the left tries to subvert the legal system to emasculate Trump, the more the latter wins popularity, especially in traditionally non-Republican constituencies, even as Biden slumps in the polls. And two, the four criminal cases are starting to fall apart because of their sheer ridiculousness and abject bias.

...So what will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes?

One, we have entered new territory. There will soon be hundreds of local and state prosecutors who feel they have now been given license in election years to go after national presidential candidates for political advantage, both local and national.

Two, conservatives are in a dilemma: whether to restore deterrence by boomeranging the left’s extra-legal effort to ruin a candidate and president or to refrain from what would be a descent into third-world, tit-for-tat criminalization of politics.

Three, the persecution of Trump, coupled with the derelict candidacy of Joe Biden, threatens to erode the traditional base of the Democratic Party and redefine politics in terms of class rather than race. Minorities are beginning to empathize with the gagged, railroaded, and victimized Trump while distancing themselves from the victimizers, who are using their “privilege” to warp the law on behalf of a bullying president.

Four, the U.S. has lost a great deal of credibility abroad due to the erosion of what was once seen as the greatest system of jurisprudence in the world. No longer.

Bottom line: America is in decline.