If you come for the king, you had best be careful not to miss. Donald Trump may not be a monarch, except in the eyes of his more venomous detractors, but his enemies have nonetheless ignored this sage wisdom. Sadly, the crusade to “get Trump” has also been to the misfortune of the country at large.
Ever since Donald Trump walked down the escalator, his enemies, whether they call themselves liberals, moderates or conservatives, have shown a remarkable unwillingness to meet him on the one battlefield that features most prominently in their discourse: that of democracy. Instead, they have sought to silence him through the media, censor him through digital platforms, remove him through a series of constitutional fantasies, disqualify him from running, and finally, to convict him of a conspiracy to defraud himself of money he did not actually owe the U.S. government.
The pattern is the same. A legion of “experts” will flood MSNBC and other liberal outlets promising that they have discovered “one neat trick” which will rid everyone of Donald Trump forever. Their glee upon the success of whatever scheme they have undertaken is manifest as they revel in the idea that this time Donald Trump is finished: This tape will do him in; this dossier by a foreign intelligence agent paid by the Clinton campaign will prove Russian collusion; this or that phone call will end him. Only to discover that after a few weeks no one can remember what they are supposed to be aggrieved against Donald Trump about. Instead, people are turned against the institution which was weaponized against Trump.
The Manhattan case in which Donald Trump was convicted follows this pattern. We still don’t know what exactly Trump was convicted of, as the judge prevented a former Federal Election Commissioner from being able to testify that what it was alleged he did was not in fact against the law. District Attorney Alvin Bragg threw concerns about due process to the wind, and adopted the motto of Stalin’s Secret Police head Lavrentiy Beria: “give me a man and I will find a crime.”
Trump-critical legal experts of all persuasions expressed the view that the case was weak, unprecedented, and clearly political. When MSNBC legal analysts are conceding those things, it means something. Most of those critics had taken to celebrating the verdict nonetheless, once more showing how, for those who claim a commitment to procedure and “institutions,” means are never as important as the end of getting Donald Trump.
The lesson Trump’s enemies have failed to learn is that they never actually manage to “get” Donald Trump. Polling over the week since the verdict has generally shown perhaps a one to two percent move toward Biden at best. Real, perhaps, but dwarfed by the polling shift following the big “stories” of the 2016 campaign, from the Access Hollywood tape to the debates where the media insisted Clinton dragged Trump.
In a matter of days, those who had cheered on the verdict as marking the end of Donald Trump were already blaming the Biden campaign and Democratic politicians for not running ads calling Donald Trump a convicted felon. This would seem borderline political malpractice when the Trump campaign has already leveraged Joe Biden’s decision to visibly smirk when asked whether Donald Trump was a political prisoner. But the only political practice in which many of Trump’s more voracious critics have demonstrated genuine skill is separating wealthy liberal donors from their savings, while the Biden campaign’s practice has been to resist all good advice, only to spitefully concede to pressure to adopt the worst ideas imaginable. This explains why the Biden campaign will now be calling Donald Trump a “convicted felon” in ads.
It is doubtful this will accomplish much. If there is a pattern emerging across polls, it is that a majority of the public seems to believe three things. First, and this is the point at which most Trump critics stop reading, the jury probably behaved as well as could be expected given the behavior of the judge and prosecutors and the very narrow (some might say rigged) questions posed to them. Second, that the charges, the judge, and the entire process were politically motivated. Third, that they do not believe the charges, even if true, are particularly important or bad.
The “Trump is a felon” line is therefore likely to highlight something voters do not care about, namely that a jury faced with questionable instructions and denied access to exculpatory evidence, decided to wash their hands of the case, while also reminding everyone else about how obsessed Democrats are with using the legal system to chase Donald Trump. Every time an ad plays, it will also remind voters of what ads are not talking about; namely, Biden’s plans, if they exist, to end the war in Ukraine, control the border, reduce crime, deal with Hamas, or contain China.
The actual victim of Trump’s conviction will not be Donald Trump but the legal system. This is also part of the pattern of the last decade. The campaign to take down Donald Trump has produced numerous casualties, but they are the institutions that have been weaponized against him. In 2016-2017 it was the FBI, which managed to alienate both right and left, first by daring to impugn Hillary Clinton in an election year, and then compounding that by overcompensating and going after Donald Trump on dubious Russian conspiracy allegations, ideally to ingratiate themselves with who they thought might be the winner.
The integrity of the media was an early casualty, but in 2020, the intelligence agencies and those tasked with fighting misinformation sacrificed themselves on the altar of trying to suppress coverage of the origins of COVID-19 or the veracity of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Universities and corporate America enlisted in the #resistance, resulting in Republicans, perhaps the most pro-free market force in the world, gaining a well-founded skepticism of corporate power.
Ever since the 2016 election cost them control of the Supreme Court, the Democrats have been engaged in a systematic effort to discredit the institution, a campaign that only accelerated after Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed in 2020. The decision to try to disqualify Donald Trump from the ballot on 14th Amendment grounds was a ruthless assault on the entire American constitutional system by creating a lose-lose scenario. If the Supreme Court agreed with Colorado and removed Trump, it would erode legitimacy on the right without reconciling it with the left, thus causing a constitutional crisis as states removed Trump. If the Court unanimously dismissed the effort, as it did, the presence of all three liberals in the majority did not prevent the left from declaring the decision political.
If the Colorado case represented an assault on the Supreme Court, the Manhattan case’s real victim is likely to be the American federal system of government. The case is predicated on the idea that a single-state, New York, with a partisan, elected judiciary and prosecutors, can seize property and imprison residents of other states. State Attorney General Latisha James already tried to seize half a billion dollars from Donald Trump for offenses which didn’t cost anyone any money in the hope of crippling his campaign, and now Alvin Bragg seems set to try to see if a local court in New York state can gag a candidate for president – and perhaps throw him in prison.
As with the Colorado case, a negative precedent is certain. Other states may choose not to honor New York’s power grab, in which case it will become possible for genuine criminals to dodge accountability by crossing state lines. Or the Supreme Court may intervene, giving liberals another excuse to accuse it of partisanship. They have already laid the groundwork by insisting the Court has no right to weigh in. Alternatively, conservative judges and prosecutors may issue arbitrary gag orders against Democratic politicians. In either case, the justice system will be ruined at a time when crime is out of control.
The one thing that is certain is that Donald Trump’s fate will not be determined by a Democratic judge in a Manhattan courtroom, but by the American people in November, as was always likely to be the case. All liberals have managed to do is to once more damage other institutions along the way.
Once again, they have come for the king, missed, and struck down what makes America great.
Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.
