An Open Letter to Lawfare-Loving Democrats
You’re going to have to win this one the old-fashioned way.
Speaking as a friend: Democrats, it is time to face reality. Your candidate is going to have to beat Donald Trump at the polls in November fair and square. You impeached our guy twice without lasting effect. None of the banana republic tricks and lawfare have worked.
There was also a real Republican primary which Trump won majorly. The guy is not made of Teflon or anything special like that; your efforts have just been lame and ineffectual. Time to splash some cold water on your faces and face the music. It is Biden vs. Trump. The voters will decide.
The battle to destroy Trump rather than just to beat him started way back in his first term, or even earlier. There was the initial rush to create some sort of rogue electors and deny the 2016 election. (Sounds familiar?) Then there was the Emoluments Clause, which was going to take down Trump for owning hotels that had foreign guests. Let us not forget Russiagate, a wholly-false effort to link Trump to Russian intelligence using made-up witnesses and a fake dossier.
That one could have escaped the lab, as we learn now the Trump campaign was subject to a full-court press by the Five Eyes intelligence services, who, if they could not find dope on Trump, were going to create it with false flag operatives. Along the way there were various impeachments that depended on Democratic control of the House to rig the game (both failing in the Senate). Each of these failures to weaken Trump or drive him from office was met with Democratic tears, that somehow he again escaped a carefully laid snare.
After Trump left office, the real games began, centered on the state of New York, which decided it would speak for the other 49 in trying to drive Trump out of business and into bankruptcy, and otherwise to prevent him from becoming president again. Things began with the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, in which the last remnants of the #MeToo movement were repurposed to have a court agree that Trump committed a sexual assault decades ago, so far back that the victim could not remember the year it occurred, never mind the date. No eyewitnesses and no physical evidence were presented. Nonetheless, an $83 million civil defamation judgment arising out of the alleged attack was rendered against Trump.
The next shot ended up with a judgment five times that size, over claims that for decades under the eyes of New York regulators and tax inspectors Trump had exaggerated his net worth and the worth of his properties to get better loan and insurance terms. Never mind that the state found that no harm was done, and that the creditors claimed no harm was done and indeed they profited from the loans—a conviction was possible so a conviction was made. Poison pills were embedded in that decision, making it impossible for Trump to seek an appeal without providing a multi-million dollar bond first. The interest alone on the fine runs $100,000 a day. New York might as well have revived debtor’s prison.
No matter the amounts likely reduced on appeal in both cases, neither will prevent Trump from running for president and polls show no effect on his popularity. They thus failed as much beyond harassment.
New York has one last round to expend, a Wonka-like criminal trial claiming Trump “falsified business records” in paying the adult film star Stormy Daniels to remain silent on their minutes-long affair. This one is so weak that Michael Cohen, convicted felon and certified liar, is the star witness. It is so weak that even the New York D.A. Alvin Bragg agreed to delay it. A local jury could find Trump guilty of something, but the most exciting outcome of the trial will be to see who SNL gets to play Stormy.
Outside of New York, a quick one was next, an attempt to remove Trump from the ballot in multiple states based on a fantasy reading of the 14th Amendment, Section 3, and arbitrary judgments by the Democratic secretary of state in blue Colorado and a traffic court judge in Illinois that Trump committed “insurrection” on January 6. Never mind the impeachment for insurrection found him not guilty, and that the case against him pending for his actions on January 6 (below) does not charge insurrection. In a unanimous decision (so much for court packing) the Supreme Court made short work of all that and Trump will remain on the ballot in all 50 states so that the people may vote him up or down. See a pattern here yet, Democrats?
Nathan Wade resigned as special prosecutor after a Georgia judge ruled Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis can continue prosecuting her racketeering case against Trump if Wade—with whom she had a secret romantic relationship—is removed from the case. While that is playing out, the underlying case itself has been hopelessly delayed, and even before the recent mess, Willis herself predicted it would take until early 2025 to decide. One pundit wrote “to call the case troubled would be a great understatement.”
That leaves the classified documents case and Jack Smith’s unconvincing January 6 case.
The classified documents case faces an uphill battle, as the defense is sure to raise the question of how classified documents at the homes of Mike Pence and Joe Biden himself did not bring on prosecutions while Trump is in a multi-year struggle and had his home dramatically raided by the FBI. It is a complicated case, involving presidential privilege and the rabbit hole of what is classified and how a document is unclassified. These complexities work to Trump’s advantage, most likely postponing the trial until well after November 5 when it really does not matter much anymore one way or another.
That pretty much is the story for the mother of them all, the January 6 case. There is a slim chance the Supreme Court will decide in favor (a ruling is expected in June) of Trump having presidential immunity for his actions on that day, and a greater chance the Court’s process will drag on such that the trial will not be ready to hear until smack in the middle of the actual election season.
The Justice Department has its own internal rule barring prosecutors from “selecting the timing of any action…for the purpose of affecting any election,” suggesting that it too will pend until after November. Again, if Trump wins the election all the wind leaves the sails of this case, and if Trump loses to Biden, no one will care about January 6 anymore anyway.
So, Democratic friends, where does that leave you?
Nothing on the legal horizon will prevent Trump from being the Republican nominee. Nothing even in worst case scenarios will leave him ineligible to serve as president. Polls consistently show these legal issues do little to reduce his popularity and in some cases appear to enhance it. Polls show Trump can win from inside a jail cell. You are wasting enormous amounts of time and effort on a strategy that is not likely to work and holds the possibility of actually working against you and helping Trump with the only thing that really matters in any of this, November 5.
Americans are turned off watching “people in positions of great power and responsibility, in the midst of a campaign, would use the justice system to ‘curb’ one of the two major presidential candidates. They might find it outrageous that those people, a coalition of elected Democrats, Biden administration appointees, Democratic Party activists, and career lawfare specialists, are in fact desperately pushing the system to work faster to win verdicts by Election Day.”
Your strategy is backfiring. No American election has featured this much meddling by the judicial system, and this much naked partisanship from the Justice Department and its proxy, the state of New York. It does not sit well with the American sense of fair play. You blew it. You threw it all against the wall and nothing stuck.
Meanwhile, the Republican primary with its Democratic Great Hopes like Nikki Haley, failed to move the dial on Trump. Sitting in first place, he refused to be drawn into being a punching bag during televised debates with his opponents, and instead one-by-one put them down, solidifying his position as the inevitable nominee as early as Super Tuesday. No one from the right is going to save you, Dems.
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You’re just going to have to win or lose this one the old fashioned way.
Coming to the same conclusion from a very different angle is the New York Times, which editorializes Trump must be found guilty—of something—to convince Americans as the last line of defense to vote as if democracy is at death’s door. Slate writes “it’s clear that if anyone is going to save American democracy, it is going to be the voters…. It deludes us into thinking that someone else is going to rush in while we watch and cheer from the stands…. We need to stop deluding ourselves that a majority of the Supreme Court sees the same political emergency that many of us do in terms of the threat Trump poses to American democracy.”
Yes, well, never mind that last bit of editorializing; that’s just the mainstream media at work. Nobody besides the Democratic inner circle and Rachel Maddow’s butler believes democracy is going to end in November. The bottom line: You Democrats still have a chance to make this race about something other than Orange Man Guilty and the Two Minutes Hate.
