How Democrat Lawfare Launched Trump’s Comeback
When Donald Trump left Washington on January 20, 2021, the consensus among our ruling elites was that his tumultuous career in politics was at an end. The Democrats, however, were taking no chances. Having impeached him just a week earlier in the House of Representatives, they were hard at work preparing to put him on trial in the Senate for “incitement of insurrection” despite the fact that he was no longer in office. They were so fearful that Trump might stage a comeback that they hoped to convict him of an offense that would forever disqualify him from holding public office at any time in the future.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine, which includes this article and others like it.
Three weeks later, the Senate began an impeachment trial that was so constitutionally questionable that Chief Justice John Roberts refused to preside over the farce. During the ensuing antics, one of Trump’s attorneys, Bruce Castor, explicitly called out the Democrats concerning their real motive for insisting on the unprecedented proceeding: “Let’s understand why we are really here. We are really here because the majority in the House of Representatives does not want to face Donald Trump as a political rival in the future.” Trump was inevitably acquitted by the Senate, and Castor proved remarkably prescient.
This impeachment charade was the beginning of a multi-year legal campaign, the primary purpose of which was to associate the former president, in the public psyche, with a fictitious conspiracy to undermine our democracy and to assure that his viability as a future presidential candidate was irreparably damaged. Trump, however, was not so easily disposed of. As Gallup reported at the time of Trump’s departure from Washington, “Republicans’ average 88% approval of Trump ties Eisenhower’s as the highest own-party approval score, though most presidents had better-than 80% approval among their fellow partisans.”
This article is taken from The American Spectator’s fall 2024 print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine.
Moreover, a mere five weeks after leaving office, he appeared at CPAC in Orlando, Florida, where he delivered a ninety-minute speech that made it clear that he had no intention of retiring in disgrace. Trump spoke to an enthusiastic audience that cheered when he teased a 2024 presidential run and said his political career was “far from over.” This rattled Democrats, who decided to conduct a public “investigation” of the January 6 riot. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed a select committee consisting of seven Democrats and two notorious RINOs, which predictably devolved into a nakedly partisan inquisition. As Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation put it:
Democrats are so brazen they’ve even hired the former president of ABC News to turn the hearings into ‘made-for-TV’ political theater. You can expect a one-sided partisan narrative intent on slandering the left’s political opponents—starting with former President Donald Trump and extending to other conservatives—that has nothing to do with strengthening our republic and everything to do with distracting from their abysmal failures in every major policy area.
The committee’s first hearing was held on June 9, 2022, during prime time and was carried by all the major broadcast and cable networks. The effect of this circus on the public was, however, not what the Democrats had hoped for. Indeed, according to the RealClearPolitics average, Trump’s overall favorability rating climbed by nearly 7 points within ten days of the first televised committee hearing. The significance of this was clearly not lost on congressional Democrats or the White House. It is no coincidence that, less than ninety days later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted an unprecedented raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
This was the first time in American history a raid of this kind had been carried out at the residence of a former president, and it unnerved most Republican and Independent voters. Its pretext was that Trump had classified documents that should have gone to the National Archives. Historically, when presidents have inadvertently taken such documents home after leaving office, the Department of Justice has negotiated with their legal staffs to retrieve the material. In Trump’s case, FBI Director Christopher Wray sent thirty heavily armed agents to surround the resort while Trump was out of town and ransacked his family’s private quarters.
This turned out to be a major blunder. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith, a federal prosecutor with a long record of fumbling several high-profile cases, as special counsel in the matter. Smith indicted Trump in June of 2023 on seven criminal counts of mishandling classified documents. In July of 2024, however, Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the prosecution, citing Garland’s violation of the Constitution’s Appointments Clause in assigning Smith to the case. Now, according to Fox News, Trump is suing the DOJ for $100M over the Mar-a-Lago raid. Trump attorney Daniel Epstein told Fox News:
Garland and Wray should have never approved a raid and subsequent indictment of President Trump because the well-established protocol with former U.S. presidents is to use non-enforcement means to obtain records of the United States.… If the government is able to say, well, we don’t like someone, we can raid their home, we can violate their privacy, we can breach protocols when we decide to prosecute them, we can use the process to advance our personal motives.
In addition to causing the dismissal of the classified documents case, the incompetence of the FBI, Garland, and Jack Smith made Trump into a martyr and all but guaranteed that he would capture the GOP presidential nomination. Moreover, sympathy for Trump is by no means limited to Republican voters. According to Democrat pollster Douglas Schoen, half of all voters agree with the following statement: “The indictments against Donald Trump are a form of election interference, being carried out by liberal prosecutors, the Biden administration, and the Justice Department.” The status of each of the four major cases as of this writing is as follows:
- As noted above, the classified documents case in which Trump is charged with the unauthorized retention of national security secrets and obstruction of efforts by the government to retrieve the files has been dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon. Nonetheless, Jack Smith insists that he will appeal the ruling in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. It is extremely unlikely that there will be any major new development in this case until well after the November election.
- The federal January 6 case, also brought by special counsel Jack Smith, involves one count of conspiracy to “violate rights,” one count of conspiracy to defraud the government, and one count each of obstructing an official proceeding and conspiring to do so. Judge Tanya Chutkan has effectively put the case on hold while she assesses how the recent SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity affects it. No significant developments are expected until after November.
- In the election interference case in Georgia brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Trump and eighteen associates were indicted on conspiracy charges related to attempts to overturn the state’s results and subvert the will of the voters. This case is on hold while an appeals court determines if Willis has a conflict of interest that requires her to be removed from the prosecution. No major developments are expected until after the November election.
- In the Manhattan hush-money case, brought by District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Trump was charged in April 2023 with thirty-four counts of falsifying Trump Organization business records related to reimbursing his lawyer and for payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on all counts, and Trump is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Juan Merchan on September 18. Most experts expect Trump to receive a suspended sentence.
All of which brings us to the resilience of Donald J. Trump. He had a remarkably successful first term as president, despite the best efforts of the swamp creatures to drown him in the muck. Then, after “defeating” him in 2020, they maligned him in the media as an aspiring dictator, raided his home, illegally removed his name from state ballots, arrested him, forced him to sit for demeaning mugshots, and convicted him based on a legal theory that most experts found laughable. This would have caused almost anyone reading this column to throw their hands up and say, “Nothing is worth this.” But he knows we are worth it.
Can he win? Despite the candidate bait-and-switch that the Democrats executed in July, Trump is doing better in polls than he did in 2016 and 2020. According to RealClearPolitics, he was 5 points behind in the national polls in August 2016, yet he defeated Hillary Clinton. In August of 2020, he was 7 points behind Biden in the national polls and lost by a tiny percentage. That suggests that the paltry 1.5-point lead Harris holds just after the Democratic National Convention is never going to get her across the finish line ahead of the Bad Orange Man. If he wins in November, he will owe the victory to the relentless lawfare campaign the Democrats have waged against him.
Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine.
The post How Democrat Lawfare Launched Trump’s Comeback appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.