Trump’s Detractors, Lacking Confidence in the Voters, Turn to Prosecutors To Bring Him Down

A vast canvas of confected legal harassment and monstrous defamation is being assembled and discharged against the 45th president.

by Conrad Black

The Trump-haters are now somnambulating toward the cliff. There is not and never was any serious argument against President Trump’s right to seek the presidency again except for two: proper people didn’t like him and he was going to overturn a bipartisan system in which many were very comfortable.

Behind these two objections, and neither can be argued very convincingly, a vast canvas of confected legal harassment and monstrous defamation has been assembled and discharged. Finally, all that is left is the prayerful hope that the American prosecutocracy can bring him down; the voters be damned.

As mentioned here last week, Peggy Noonan proudly stated her encapsulation of Trump-hate, after a friend’s recitation of some of his achievements as president: “He’s a bad man.” An approximately equally fervent and fluent Trump hater, but from the other side of the political spectrum, Maureen Dowd, took a similar perspective in the New York Times on Sunday: “A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.”

The assumption is and has always been, whether anyone actually believed it or not, that Mr. Trump is a chronic lawbreaker, almost a gangster, who is perversely motivated to reduce America to chaos. Ms. Dowd asked hopefully, “Has Trump finally run out of time. … Are those ever-loving walls really closing in this time? We were expecting (this from) the investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia and his potential obstruction of justice.”

She overlooks the inconvenient fact that the Russian collusion argument was not only a fiction; it was a malicious defamation devised by operatives of the Clinton campaign and advanced by the directors of the FBI, CIA, NIA, and other prominent supposedly nonpolitical figures in the Justice Department, with the knowledge of President Obama, Vice President Biden, and the Clintons.

Ms. Dowd confines her lamentation to “regarding obstruction of justice, the final report [of Robert Mueller] was flaccid, waffling, legalistic” — because there was no obstruction. This is Trump-hate-speak for expressing a complete lack of interest in the fact that Mr. Trump no more colluded with Russia than Ms. Dowd and Ms. Noonan did, did not obstruct anyone, and Robert Mueller and his “dream team” of partisan “legal talent” failed to manufacture or distort enough facts and transgressions to strangle the Trump presidency.

Trump-haters, having little choice left, have decided which hill to die on: the mass production assembly line of spurious Trump indictments. Even Ms. Dowd allows that the special prosecutor ”has a Herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women were determined to pull off a coup.”

There is no evidence nor any conceivable possibility that Mr. Trump had any thought of a coup. The idea that he had any thought at all of a violent overthrow of government is so fatuous that in any other circumstances except the frequent punctuation of sane political discourse by the faithful geyser of Trump-hate, any people uttering such nonsense would be urged by their friends to seek psychiatric help.

The Dowd column was a bit of a disappointment: it started out as a fiery tocsin but gradually dwindled down to the demoralized admission that “Trump ultimately might not be charged with staging an insurrection or sedition. And that would be a shame. For the first time, a president who lost an election nakedly attempted to hold onto power and override the votes of millions of Americans. If that isn’t sedition, it’s hard to figure what is.”

Here again is the admission that Trump’s enemies refuse to recognize the real point of contention. This, as I and a few others have said and written until we were almost blue in the face, is the first time in American elections when questions have been raised about the validity of millions of mailed-in ballots, in part because few of them were cast under the eyes of scrutineers in voting places.

Voting and vote counting rules were fundamentally changed especially in a number of swing states and the process of change was not enacted as the Constitution requires, by vote of the state legislatures. This is the cold Trump-hate terror that dare not speak its name: the election may indeed have been stolen.

That was the subject of the complaints on January 6, 2021, and the complaints are compounded by the fact that the judiciary, at various levels and in many states and even at the Supreme Court, declined to judge the merits of any of them.

Mr. Trump was late-acting, allowed his challenge to become confused with the carnival conducted by Mayor Giuliani and, acting on her own account, Sidney Powell, but that is his complaint and no paroxysms of venomous self-righteousness by the Trump-haters will banish that complaint.

Despite the almost unanimous press effort to revile and bury Mr. Trump’s complaint, approximately half the electorate acknowledges that there are serious doubts about the validity of the official outcome of the 2020 election. Since the courts have abdicated their responsibility as a coequal branch of government on this issue, only the voters can determine it.

I wrote at the outset of this column of somnambulation because as Mr. Trump’s detractors watch eagerly for the approach of the walls around the 45th president, they are apparently unaware of the mounting evidence of a corrupt influence-peddling operation the Biden family has been conducting in many foreign countries apparently for decades.

The Trump-haters decline to notice the millions of illegal immigrants, the skyrocketing crime rates, the green terror, the sharp reductions in the purchasing power of the great majority of American families since Mr. Trump left office, and the shambles of American foreign policy highlighted by the self-inflicted disgrace of the pell-mell flight from Afghanistan.

They have placed all their bets on the ability of the Justice Department to transform itself into an arm of the dirty tricks division of the Democratic National Committee and, as the 2024 election campaign gets underway, to deluge the leader of the opposition /former president with spurious political indictments. Knowledgeable lawyers can be dragooned into stating that there is some merit in the documents case, but in fact it is not the sort of dispute that remotely justifies criminal prosecution of a former president.

Yet everybody knows in advance the rest of these charges are the final desecration of the American criminal justice system, which almost anyone who has had anything to do with it has known for many years to be a cesspool of corruption and oppression.

The same system that convicts 98 percent of its accused, 95 percent of that without trial, is now being used to shred the Constitution and transform the United States into a one-party state. The country won’t have it, and if there is general recognition of the rot of the justice system, that is a providential development.

Something vital to the American state is tinkering with suicide and there is something particularly fitting that the film industry, such a pulsating heart of American self-loathing at its most vain and vulgar, is also perhaps subconsciously contemplating suicide in the present strike.

Abraham Lincoln warned that suicide and not foreign invasion was the threat to American democracy. It won’t happen now. Trumpism will prevail and rational public discourse will return. If Hollywood did not prove so resilient, countless millions of people all over the world would be consolable.

First published in the New York Sun.