Democrats have made Trump a victim, increasing his chances

“Be careful what you wish for”, along with similar maxims such as “Mr Sorry comes too late”, dispensed to their charges by generations of nannies – the caste that, in this country, fulfils the prophetic role occupied in other cultures by Zarathustra – is beginning to assume an ominous significance for Democrats in America.

The problem for the blue manipulators of justice is that their version of Baldrick’s cunning plan is beginning not only to unravel, but is threatening to blow up in their faces. When first conceived, it all seemed so simple. Get Democrat prosecutors in blue jurisdictions to file multiple indictments against Donald Trump, arraign him in front of Democrat-appointed judges and juries selected from precincts where the Democrat vote at elections is weighed rather than counted, and, by the scattergun effect of innumerable charges, some would be bound to result in conviction.

Whether Trump were fined or imprisoned, even though the US constitution would still allow him to contest the presidency, his reputation would be so discredited that independent voters would shun him and, with luck, even many of his base supporters would desert him. It was a scheme that demonstrated the advantage enjoyed by the Biden camp having the bureaucratic machinery of the state onside: prosecutors, Justice Department, the heavily politicised FBI, mainstream media, reliable judges. What was not to like?

Granted, this conspiracy-in-plain-sight trashed the entire American justice system and made it an object of global derision, but who cared, when the purpose was to destroy the individual who has become the object of hysterical hatred to the US elites? There is an echo of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in recent Trump derangement rants (“Kill the pig!”). To the Democratic party, transformed and degraded beyond recognition, all the historical American decencies no longer carry any weight, compared with the need to retain power and annihilate the alien force from beyond the Beltway that threatens, once again, to intrude the aspirations of Middle America into the counsels of Capitol Hill.

To pause for a moment, ignore the round-the-clock propaganda of the mainstream media, here as well as in America, and take stock of the shameless farces being enacted in American courtrooms is to realise that the “justice, democracy and human rights” that the United States claims to champion against the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are a hollow sham.

Recently, Joe Biden condemned allegedly authoritarian leaders overseas who imprison their opponents in advance of elections – while at that very moment his own governmental machine was moving heaven and earth to put Donald Trump behind bars. The cliché “You couldn’t make it up” was exhausted months ago in observing the charade whereby centuries of democratic conventions dating from 1776 and earlier were trampled into oblivion in America.

The fact that one man, and he a recent President and Commander-in-Chief, is facing four indictments and 91 felonies demonstrates the extent to which the Democratic war machine has run away with itself, its overreach demolishing its credibility. Prosecutors would have struggled to amass 91 felonies against Al Capone. The technical charge of falsifying business records to conceal “hush money” payments to a porn actress is, at worst, a misdemeanour, promoted to a felony by those holding the levers of power, to evade the lapsing of a statute of limitations and increase the gravity of the charge. This is American justice?

Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and no friend of Trump, believes he should have been prosecuted somewhere outside Manhattan, to ensure a fairer trial, but he also recognises the partisan nature of the case: “I have been teaching, practising and writing about criminal law for 60 years. In all those years, I have never seen or heard of a case in which the defendant has been criminally prosecuted for failing to disclose the payment of what prosecutors call ‘hush money’.”

He pointed out that one of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, paid hush money to cover up an affair, with impunity. He is confident that, if Trump were convicted, an appellate court would reverse it; but that would occur after the presidential election. He wrote: “If the defendant were not Donald Trump and the venue were not Manhattan, this ought to be a slam dunk win for the defendant. Indeed, this extraordinarily weak case would never have been brought.”

The same applies to all Trump’s indictments. The Georgia prosecutor has been exposed as having lavished public money on her fellow prosecutor and lover: he has retired from the case, but she refuses to recuse herself. Illegal retention of state papers? The chauffeur could not manoeuvre Joe Biden’s limousine out of his chock-full garage without dislodging bundles of nuclear codes, NATO battle orders, whatever; but that’s okay because Joe is too senile to stand trial – but not, apparently, to govern the United States.

As for the “insurrection” on January 6, that was apparently the biggest threat to the United States since the Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumpter in 1861, whereas the besieging and torching of public buildings in Portland, Oregon, over weeks of BLM riots, were “largely peaceful demonstrations”. Trump’s actual tweet on 6 January urged his supporters to go to the Capitol and demonstrate peacefully, while respecting the forces of law and order. That was clearly the order for mass insurrection (though, curiously, confined to one locality and nowhere else in America, as a genuine coup would have required). 

The Democrats’ calculation that American voters would turn away with aversion from a man charged (by his enemies) with so many offences seems to have been mistaken. They took heart from an exit poll taken at the caucuses that showed some Trump supporters and independents would be less likely to vote for him if he were convicted. A sizeable number of polls since have shown vaguely similar results, but the reality is that it is always difficult to survey voters on a hypothetical outcome.

For example, some people might claim, in the event of a conviction, that Trump had forfeited their votes. But would that be a sincere conversion, or might it simply reflect a reluctance to be seen to be condoning “criminal” activity? Might a review of the circumstances and of the other reasons to vote for Trump – or, just as likely, reasons not to vote for Joe Biden – during the period before polling day provoke second thoughts and a vote for Trump?

That scenario, however, is the least of the Democrats’ worries. More serious, from their perspective, is the most recent opinion poll for The Telegraph, conducted by Redfield and Wilton Strategies, showing voters in four key swing states more likely to vote for Trump if he is convicted. In Georgia, 35 per cent of voters said a conviction would make them more likely to vote for Trump; the same applied in Michigan, North Carolina and Florida; in Arizona, voters were split evenly on the issue, so no gain there for the Democrats from their legal skulduggery; only in Pennsylvania, by a narrow margin, did voters profess themselves less likely to vote for Trump if he were convicted.

The internet is awash with baffled leftists wondering how this can be. The answer is obvious: by persecuting Donald Trump in so aggressive a manner, the Democrats have turned him into the ultimate cultural icon of contemporary America: a victim. In any other circumstances, Trump would have been the unlikeliest candidate for victimhood on the face of the earth; but the tin-eared, out-of-touch Democratic elite has blundered into handing their worst enemy this winning card and he is already playing it dexterously.

Nor is it a disinterested sympathy for the underdog that has turned some neutral Americans into MAGA supporters. Americans, with a contrived constitution that commands enormous ingrained respect, cherish their institutions. When the Democrats, indulging in vengeful overkill, tried to exclude Trump from the ballot in a number of states, alarm bells rang loudly behind the white picket fences where soft-spoken, authentic Middle America has its being, far from the raucous demonstrations of social justice warriors.

If an individual is to be disqualified from serving as president of the United States, it should be done by voters in the polling booth, not by Democratic judges in courthouses. Americans, regardless of their views on Trump, see that their justice system is being debased for partisan purposes and they are deeply concerned. That now shows in the opinion polls.

A recent poll in the New York Times found that Biden leads Trump among African-American voters by 63 per cent to 23 per cent – on the face of it, good news for Biden. In fact, it is very bad news for the incumbent, since that 63 per cent is a massive slump from the 87 per cent of African-American votes he gained in 2020. As for Hispanics and voters under 30, Biden is almost tied with Trump; but in those demographics he should be soaringly ahead.

The headline polling shows the two candidates neck-and-neck at around 37 per cent each. But that is misleading since, in the crucial swing states that will decide the composition of the electoral college, Trump is leading in five of the six and in four of them his vote is up at 49 or 50 per cent. Analysts point to several issues that could play against Trump, e.g. abortion; but most of the voters who, in a presidential election would be swayed by such an issue are already committed, either pro-abortion leftist Democrats or pro-life GOP voters.

The loose cannon is the participation of a third candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Some say his fondness for conspiracy theories could attract some MAGA voters, but why, when their own hero is on the ballot? Kennedy seems more likely to solidify the drift away from Biden among the three demographics already noted.

Anything can happen between now and the election, but if that turns out to be one or more convictions of Donald Trump, Democrats would be unwise to count on it as a game changer – at least in the way they hope. The unedifying spectacle of a former president being humiliated and distracted from his election campaign by a coterie of Democrats and fellow travellers in the role of judges and prosecutors, supported by a bunch of questionable witnesses, may not inspire Americans with confidence that their constitutional liberties are safe in Democratic hands.

It may, of course, transpire that the outcome of the election will be determined by Joe Biden’s intrinsic unelectability. “Cannibals ate my uncle” may be a creative variation on “The dog ate my homework”, but it is not the best argument for awarding the dotard who uttered it four more years with his tremulous finger on the nuclear trigger. America has never been more in need of sure-footed leadership than in the present geopolitical crisis.

Hauling Donald Trump before a bewildering sequence of kangaroo courts may have seemed a good idea at the time, but the Democrats may find that their marsupial justice propels Trump into victim status – and then into the White House.

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