Indicting Trump Could Get Him Reelected

As former UN Ambassador John Bolton told CNN, “Having very much in mind the one rule of law for everybody … I think historians would look back and say, that’s the act that reelected Donald Trump president.” Bolton’s allusion to equal treatment under the law was echoed in the New York Sun by Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School: “Mr. Trump should not be indicted for novel and unprecedented technical crimes for which no one else would be prosecuted.” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley adds in the Hill that Bragg’s case would be exceptionally weak at the very best:

Although it may be politically popular, the case is legally pathetic. Bragg is struggling to twist state laws to effectively prosecute a federal case long ago rejected by the Justice Department against Trump over his payment of “hush money” to former stripper Stormy Daniels. In 2018 (yes, that is how long this theory has been around), I wrote how difficult such a federal case would be under existing election laws. Now, six years later, the same theory may be shoehorned into a state claim.… More importantly, Bragg himself previously expressed doubts about the case, effectively shutting it down soon after he took office.

Bragg has been denounced not only by current House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and former Speaker Newt Gingrich, but also by one of Trump’s rivals for the GOP presidential nomination. Vivek Ramaswamy posted a Twitter video on this issue that went viral. You may not have heard of him yet, but he does an excellent job of summing up the very real danger with Bragg’s expected indictment: “It is a dark day in America if you have the ruling party in this country using police power to arrest its political opposition.” He then challenges “the beloved donor-class favorites in this race” to join him in denouncing this prosecution.

If you doubt that prosecuting Trump for transparently political reasons will generate enough outrage among the voters to get him over the top in 2024, remember how narrow Biden’s margin was in 2020. The FEC totals show that fewer than 43,000 ballots in three states garnered Biden enough electoral votes to win. Then consider the pessimism most Americans feel about the economy. A recent Gallup poll found the following: “Americans are more likely to predict negative rather than positive outcomes for five key aspects of the U.S. economy over the next six months.” As Julian Epstein writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The Biden economy has been the worst-performing of any Democratic president since Jimmy Carter by most measures. Voters have expressed strong bipartisan dissatisfaction with the worst inflation and interest-rates hikes in nearly half a century after White House economic bureaucrats pushed for an additional and unneeded $2 trillion Covid stimulus.… Many of the supposedly new jobs created under Mr. Biden are rebound jobs from the pandemic, and labor-force participation is abysmally low. Retirement funds have been decimated with one of the worst-performing stock markets in memory.

Judging by the Biden administration’s recently submitted budget, which includes $4.7 trillion in tax increases, our economic travails are likely to get worse. Yet, during his remarks last week about the recent spate of bank failures, Biden insisted that he is presiding over an economic boom: “We have made strong economic progress in the past two years.” He then cited the phony job creation figures noted above and the artificially low unemployment rate caused by a labor-force participation rate that remains below its pre-pandemic level. He even claimed that wages have increased, directly contradicting the latest BLS report.

Biden’s economic performance and his delusional view of how good things are contribute to the public’s perception that he is in the midst of a cognitive decline. This is, of course, one of the reasons a recent Associated Press-NORC survey indicated that only 37 percent of Democrats say they want him to seek a second term. Combined with his foreign policy ineptitude in Afghanistan and Ukraine and the stench of corruption that emanates from “the family business,” Biden would be a target-rich environment for any challenger in 2024, particularly if that challenger is known to be the target of taxpayer-funded lawfare.

Which brings us back to the Manhattan district attorney and his indictment. It is no mean feat to make Donald Trump look like a victim, but Alvin Bragg may well manage it if he is dumb enough to prosecute the Bad Orange Man for a hush-up payment to a woman with whom she claims he had a liaison dangereuse in 2006. It is no coincidence that Trump was the first to make his imminent arrest public via Truth Social. He knows that, even if convicted, he can represent himself as bloody but unbowed by dark forces of a Democratic Party that can’t defeat him honestly. It’s a good strategy and Trump is a master of reality TV.

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