The Travesties of the Trump Trials

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared.

Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season.

These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.

Indeed, the nation is by now worn out by these serial assaults on constitutional norms: the Hillary-funded Steele dossier subterfuge; the pre-election Russian laptop disinformation campaign; the two impeachments without special counsel reports; the impeachment Senate trial of a private citizen; the effort to remove Trump’s name from state ballots; the ongoing attempt to emasculate the Electoral College; or the radical opportune changes in state election laws to ensure massive mail-in balloting.

Recently, Andrew McCarthy has reviewed in depth this coordination between White House personnel and prosecutors, long known and long denied by the left. Biden, for example, had complained to aides about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tardiness in getting special federal prosecutor Smith appointed—and thus apparently ensuring Trump was convicted before the election.

Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’s now-fired paramour prosecutor, visited and consulted with the White House counsel’s office when he was acting supposedly as a purely local county prosecutor. The January 6^th left-wing-dominated congressional committee consulted with the Biden administration in sending forth its criminal referrals about Trump’s purported role in the protests. And to handle his pseudo-indictment against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hired Biden Justice Department official Vincent Colangeio.

Two, the prosecutors’ delayed criminal indictments and E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit were predicated only on Donald Trump running for reelection. After his 2020 defeat, the loss of the two Republican senate seats in Georgia, and the January 6 demonstrations/riot, Trump was written off by pundits as politically toxic.

Then his historic comeback in the subsequent year terrified the left. The reboot prompted the subsequent indictments and suits years after the purported crimes. It was left unsaid that had Trump not been a conservative Republican and leading presidential candidate, he would have never been indicted.

Three, most of the indictments either had no prior precedent in criminal law or will likely never be used again, at least against anyone left-wing. Moreover, many of the writs relied on manipulation of statutes of limitations.

Neither Bragg nor any other local prosecutor had previously transformed a supposedly local affidavit misdemeanor into a supposed federal campaign finance violation, a gambit so preposterous that it had been passed on by federal attorneys.

Letitia James was the first New York Attorney General to indict a state resident for the supposed crime of overvaluing real estate to obtain a loan, which was paid back timely and in full, to the profit of lending institutions. No bank, after auditing Trump’s assets and viability to pay back loans, was unhappy to loan to him. But all were quite happy to profit from the hefty interest—and would likely be happy to loan to him again.

James sought to make Trump a criminal without ever finding a crime, much less a victim. Nor, until the checkered and unethical career of Fani Willis, had any local prosecutor ever indicted an ex-president for a supposedly improper phone call questioning whether all the state’s votes had been fully counted.

Alvin Bragg’s case was nonexistent given the statute of limitations on supposed misdemeanors committed over six years prior—until Bragg transmogrified the accusations of minor crimes into felonies and, with them, extensions granted supposedly due to the COVID lockdowns.

In Carroll’s case, her unsubstantiated accusations of a sexual assault were also well past the statute of limitations until a left-wing New York legislator and unapologetic Trump hater passed a special law—a veritable bill of attainder aimed at Trump—waiving the statute of limitations for a year in cases of accusations of long-past sexual assault in the state of New York.

Four, all the indictments and suits took place in either blue cities, counties, or states. And most of the jury pools in or near New York, Atlanta, or Miami were or will be heavily Democrat. So far, the New York judges who have overseen Trump’s civil and criminal trials—Justices Engoron, Kaplan, and Merchan—were all liberals, appointed by Democrat or liberal politicians, and some have donated to Democrat causes. They were not shy about expressing disdain for defendant Trump. No changes in venues were ever allowed.

Five, all the prosecutors, Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis, are likewise either Democrats or associated with liberal causes. In the case of Bragg, James, and Willis, all three ran for office and raised money on promises and boasts of getting Donald Trump. And all three have now set the precedent that local and state prosecutors can warp the law and use it to go after an ex-president and leading presidential candidate of the opposite party for naked political purposes.

Six, all these cases were equally applicable to high-profile Democrat politicos. E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit was the most laughable of all the court dramas, but its outline and protocols just as easily could have applied to Tara Reade. She came forward to accuse candidate Biden of having sexually assaulted her years earlier—roughly about the same period’s as Carroll’s fluid timelines. Her story is about as believable or unbelievable as Carroll’s. But the difference was that whereas the media canonized the delusional and self-contradictory Carroll as a useful anti-Trump tool, it demonized Reade as a crazy loon and liar—and a potential impediment to Biden’s 2019-20 primary campaign.

Bragg had to torture the law to fabricate a federal campaign finance indictment against Trump. But Hillary Clinton clearly violated federal campaign statutes—and was variously fined—when she tried to hide her “opposition research” payments to Christopher Steele as “legal expenses.” In truth, Steele was hired and paid to concoct a fake anti-Trump dossier and likely should have been barred from working for a presidential campaign given he was not a U.S. citizen.

In the case of Smith, simultaneously with his case against Trump, his twin special prosecutor, Robert Hur, found that Joe Biden had unlawfully removed classified files for much longer than Trump (30 years plus), in a much less secure location (his rickety garage), and without a president’s authority to declassify his documents. Moreover, he had disclosed their contents to his ghostwriter, who destroyed evidence under subpoena by Hur. Yet unlike Trump, Biden was not charged, given that Hur claimed that Biden, in his opinion, was so old and amnesiac that he might win sympathy rather than a conviction from a jury.

Willis indicted Trump for supposedly trying to pressure officials to “find” missing Trump ballots, thus supposedly violating “racketeering” statutes, as he oversaw an attempt to find troves of ballots he thought had been cast for him. Of course, in the same state, Stacy Abrams, after losing the gubernatorial race of 2018, claimed she had actually won, despite losing by over 50,000 votes. She sued to overturn the election and then made a celebrity-political career touring the nation, falsely claiming she was the real governor and her victorious opponent was an illegitimate governor.

First published in American Greatness