Trumped Up

For what it is worth, I believe that, at least in terms of the declared outcome, the 2020 American Presidential Election was as sound as such a thing could ever be. But I shall never quite be closed to an alternative possibility, because I have been dealing all my life with the political machine the motor of which was the liberal wing of the American Democratic Party, with cogs including the right wings of the British Labour Party and of the Australian Labor Party, although it is not confined to one party in any of those three countries or of several others. More lately, it has acquired far more of a presence outside the English-speaking world, perhaps due to the hegemony of Hollywood, which has given us the equally objectionable sweariness in English of many young people from the Continent.

That machine accepts no limit on its nefarious practices. It defenestrated Jeremy Corbyn, it subjected Boris Johnson to a kangaroo court, it incited violence against Nigel Farage, it incited the attempted murder of George Galloway, it tried to imprison Alex Salmond for the rest of his life, and it persecutes the world-historical figure of Julian Assange. Each of those will always be much bigger than any of his enemies, but the point still stands. The treatment of us little people is, if anything, even more brutal. When I was in prison, the Officers never tired of telling me that I was obviously the victim of far from the first political stitch-up that they had seen here in the Labour Right’s historic citadel of the North East of England. Members of a deeply sound trade union that now seeks me out at the Durham Miners’ Gala, they took such conduct as par for the course.

20 or so years ago, my attempted murder, complete with hands around my throat, was ordered from within the constituency office of the then Government Chief Whip. During my incarceration, a hit was put on me, but the hitman took such a liking to me that he gave his paymasters their money back, a tale that involves the symbiotic relationship between the machine, at least in its old Anglosphere heartlands, and the liberal wing of the Catholic Church. And as to the very lowest, so to the very highest. Thus, Jenny Holland writes:

The first criminal trial of a US president is now over. And so, perhaps, is millions of people’s faith in the impartiality of the American legal system.

Yesterday in Manhattan, New York City, former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. The origin of this show trial lies with porn star Stormy Daniels, who claimed she had an affair with Trump – which he strenuously denied – and was threatening to go public with her story during the 2016 election campaign. Trump’s then lawyer paid her to stay quiet.

Trump is certainly no saint. And there are plenty of legitimate reasons not to want him anywhere near the White House again. But what was done to him in that Manhattan courtroom goes well beyond good-faith debate.

Many commentators have pointed out at length the flaws in how this case was handled. This ranges from ‘flagrant violations’ by the prosecution during the trial to bizarre rulings from the judge, including blocking a witness who could have exonerated Trump from the charge of federal election violation. Even the very premise of the case – that categorising hush-money payments to his lawyer as ‘legal expenses’ was not only illegal, but also a felony – was patently absurd. The act of falsifying business records is itself usually just a misdemeanour, and was outside the statute of limitations anyway. But this was transformed into a more serious felony charge with some legal jiggery-pokery.

This case was so obviously political that even a blind toddler could see it. The daughter of the presiding judge, New York State Supreme Court justice Juan Merchan, is an executive of a political consulting firm, which counts among its clients some of Trump’s biggest adversaries. That includes Democratic senator Adam Schiff, who led the first impeachment trial against the former president in 2020. According to the New York Post, Democratic politicians who are clients of Merchan’s daughter have even referenced her father’s case in their fundraising emails.

As reported in the New York Times this week, the state’s case was that: ‘An agreement Mr Trump struck with the National Enquirer to buy and bury unflattering stories was a “subversion of democracy” perpetuated by a “covert arm” of the 2016 Trump campaign. [The prosecutor] added that the fraud deceived voters “in a coordinated fashion”, preventing the American people from deciding for themselves whether they cared that Mr Trump slept with a porn star or not.’

Is there nothing these people won’t call an attack on democracy? This is made all the more ironic by the fact that the hush-money case itself is one of the most obvious attacks on American democracy in the nation’s history. So, squashing an unflattering story about yourself during an election campaign is against democracy now? But throwing a series of criminal trials against a popular presidential candidate is fine? What planet are these people living on?

This blatant hypocrisy seems completely lost on the American commentariat. The New York Times editorial board proclaims that the trial was ‘a remarkable display of the democratic principles that Americans prize’. On MSNBC, a guest fawned over Merchan: ‘I have a man crush on him… If you looked in the dictionary for judicial temperament, that’s what you’d get.’

The media elites have vastly misjudged the public mood here. The legal hounding of Trump is only making his base more committed to him. Ever the showman, Trump wasted no time in turning this miscarriage of justice into an opportunity to bolster his brand, which has now expanded to include the beloved American archetypes of outlaw and folk hero. Immediately after the verdict was announced, Trump’s fundraising website crashed, apparently due to an influx of donations.

Clearly, it will take more than a few trumped-up charges to dull Trump’s appeal. America’s political and media classes have been waging a covert war on working-class citizens for decades now. But convicting on the flimsiest of charges a man who is popular among millions of working Americans has brought that war out into the open. ‘If they can get Trump’, I can hear blue-collar men and women across the nation saying to each other right now, ‘they can get anyone’.

This guilty verdict is just the beginning. Trump’s sentencing is set for 11 July and, in the meantime, three other criminal cases against him trundle on. It’s going to be a long, hot summer.

Michael Lind writes:

Whatever you think of Donald Trump — and I for one think very little of him — his conviction as a felon for what would ordinarily be a minor misdemeanour by a biased jury is a grim day for democracy in America. Yesterday’s decision, the culmination of a vindictive prosecution, was less dramatic than the ransacking of the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob after the 2020 election — but the long-term ramifications are likely to be far more serious.

Trump, of course, is no angel. In 2020, he attempted to suborn vice-president Mike Pence into delaying the congressional ratification of the election results, and pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, into finding enough votes to change the electoral college outcome in his favour in Georgia. In seven other states, Trump’s henchmen also plotted to use fake electors to swing the results. To their credit, Pence, Raffensperger and other senior Republicans stood up to Trump’s bullying. The rule of law in the United States was put to the test by Donald Trump — and it passed the test.

But now, anti-Trump Democrats have put the rule of law in America to the test again — and this time it has been bent to the point of breaking. In February, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of civil fraud in a case involving alleged overstatements of real estate values. And yesterday, following the prosecution of Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg, another Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of alleged violations in a case involving the reporting of hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels. It was the first time a sitting or former US president has been convicted of a crime. It was also the first time that the allies of a president of one party have successfully weaponised the American judicial system in an attempt to destroy the presidential candidate of another.

In both of these cases, the partisan motives of the Democratic prosecutors and judges were evident. Campaigning as a Democrat for the office of Attorney General in New York State in 2018, Letitia James promised that she would selectively prosecute Trump, and find some excuse, any excuse, to do so: “I will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate president,” she said. “I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings and every dealing.” The civil fraud case brought against Trump by James was presided over by Judge Arthur Engoron, an elected judge and a Democrat who was elected to the First Judicial District of New York in 2015 without any Republican opponent, so rare are Republicans in New York.

The partisanship of the Democratic officials in the hush-money case has been just as blatant. Charges like those brought against Trump in the hush money case were rejected as too weak by Cyrus Vance, the previous Manhattan district Attorney, and they were also rejected as too flimsy by Vance’s successor, Manhattan’s current DA, Alvin Bragg. Bragg only changed his mind and brought charges against Trump after two things happened. The first was the publication of a book — People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account — by Mark Pomerantz, a member of Bragg’s team who resigned in protest in 2022, claiming that Bragg was not doing enough to prosecute Trump. The second was the fact that, by 2023, it was becoming clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee for the presidency.

“The partisanship of the Democratic officials in the hush-money case has been just as blatant.” In the hush money case, Bragg turned what would ordinarily be a minor misdemeanour involving falsifying records into a felony, by claiming that it was somehow part of a nefarious scheme to interfere in the 2016 election. Yet even eminent legal experts find it hard to explain exactly why Trump was charged: last year, even the Left-wing website Vox described the case’s “legal theory” as “dubious”.

In these two New York cases — and a third case in January, in which Trump was fined an exorbitant $83 million for allegedly defaming E. Jean Carroll after another jury in Democratic Manhattan had found him guilty of sexual abuse, but not rape — the legal theories may have been questionable, but the motivations of the prosecution were obvious. It is difficult not to believe that the purpose of the extraordinarily high fines in the civil fraud case and the defamation case has been to cripple Trump’s presidential campaign against Biden. And the manifest purpose of the conversion of a minor misdemeanour into a felony seems just as clear — to allow Biden and other Democrats to brand Trump as a “convicted felon” between now and the November election, and, if possible, to remove Trump from the campaign trail by jailing him.

Even more disturbing than these kangaroo court trials in one-party Democratic New York is the Espionage Act case against Trump, currently being prosecuted in Florida by Special Counsel Jack Smith. In 2016, all Democratic justices voted with the Republicans on the Supreme Court to overturn Smith’s earlier prosecution of Republican governor Robert McDonnell in a corruption case involving gifts; the unanimous court warned of “the broader legal implications of the Government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute”. In spite of — or perhaps because of — his overzealousness as a prosecutor, Smith was appointed by Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland, who just happened to have been blocked from a seat on the Supreme Court by the Republican Senate majority in 2016 after then-president Obama nominated him. A minor dispute over the possession of classified documents between ex-president Trump and the bureaucrats of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) gave Garland a chance to exact personal revenge. In August 2022, Garland authorised an unprecedented raid by FBI agents who, in Trump’s absence, ransacked the Florida home of the ex-president.

Like Trump, Joe Biden kept boxes of classified documents in his home following his term as Barack Obama’s vice-president. And like Trump, Biden was investigated by a special counsel appointed by Merrick Garland, Robert Hur. But Hur refused to press charges under the Espionage Act against Biden on the grounds that he is “an elderly man with a poor memory”. In stark and disturbing contrast, Smith issued a 37-count indictment against Trump, with most of the charges being based on the Espionage Act of 1917.

From the very beginning, the Espionage Act — a vague, sinister law passed by Congress in a fit of hysteria during the First World War — has been abused by presidents against opposition politicians and journalists. President Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic administration used it to give his Socialist presidential rival, Eugene Debs, a 10-year prison term in 1919. In the same year, Victor Berger, a Socialist member of the House of Representatives, was also convicted under the legislation. In spite of winning an election, Berger was denied his seat in Congress and disqualified from public office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, an irrelevant clause designed to prevent ex-Confederate insurrectionists from regaining power after the Civil War. Ironically, this is the same archaic provision that was weaponised recently by Democratic officials in Colorado, Maine and Illinois, who sought to disqualify Trump from appearing on Republican primary ballots in those states, before a unanimous Supreme Court in 2024 ruled against such efforts.

Having run for President in 1920 from behind bars, Eugene Debs was pardoned by Republican president Warren G. Harding in 1921, while Berger’s conviction was also overturned in the same year. In a similar vein, we can hope that enlightened state or federal courts will overturn the unjust convictions of Trump. But whether or not that happens, the damage to America’s democracy has largely been done.

In the short run, the corruption of the American legal system by Democrats out to get Trump has shattered the reputation of New York state as a safe place to live and do business. Yet far worse is the damage to America’s global reputation. Thanks to these Soviet-style show trials, the US can no longer plausibly claim to be a global example of the nonpartisan rule of law and constitutional government. That reputation was already damaged by Trump’s clumsy attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Today, however, thanks to his enemies’ willingness to turn the courts into tools of election interference, that perception that the US is now the world’s largest banana republic has been cemented.

For in the future, by weaponising state law to try to destroy federal candidates and officeholders of the rival party, Democrats have opened a Pandora’s box. It is probably only a matter of time before Republican attorney generals or former Democratic politicians on their own trumped-up charges. And why not? The use of lawfare against Trump has put a target on the back of Democratic politicians. Already some Republicans are calling for prosecutions of James and Bragg under an obscure federal statute against electoral interference. After all, such prosecutions, ruinous as they would be, are more plausible than the cases that those prosecutors have brought against Trump. In Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons, Sir Thomas More responds to William Roper’s statement that he would “cut down every law in England” to go after the Devil: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” The Democrats are about to learn a similar lesson: that even the Devil deserves the benefit of the law.

And I am so old that the commentariat now contains someone whose academically super-distinguished father once called me a “prophet” in print, since Sebastian Milbank writes:

On Thursday night, in a dingy New York courtroom, America crossed a Rubicon. Donald Trump became the first US President ever to be convicted of a crime. Sentencing is due to go ahead in July, and there is now a very real possibility that Trump could make history again — by being the first serious Presidential candidate to run for office from a cell. America is now in a situation where there is a non-zero chance that the country will elect a man in prison. How has this happened?

If Trump is the first President to be convicted of a crime, it is not, remotely, because he is the first President to be guilty of a crime. Even Richard Nixon, who faced impeachment and was forced to resign the Presidency, was pardoned by his successor Gerald Ford, rather than allowing a trial to go ahead. There is a very good reason for this precedent. Ford reasoned that legal proceedings would be unending — the situation was a “tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”

A former President, he correctly concluded, could not hope to get a fair trial amidst the white heat of political controversy — “After years of bitter controversy and divisive national debate, I have been advised, and I am compelled to conclude that many months and perhaps more years will have to pass before Richard Nixon could obtain a fair trial by jury in any jurisdiction of the United States under governing decisions of the Supreme Court.” And this was of course merely a former President.

Trump, meanwhile, is also a potential future president, currently running for office. Any jury who decides on his guilt or innocence is effectively being asked to decide if he should be allowed to become President. If a fair trial of Nixon was an impossibility, how much less could any American jury, however well chosen and advised, possibly reach a fair judgement about the most controversial politician in the country during an election?

As Ford put it: “The law, whether human or divine, is no respecter of persons; but the law is a respecter of reality.” But American politics has long since ceased respecting reality. Crowds outside the courtroom scream “we got him!”. The Biden campaign called Trump a “dictator” and crowed that “nobody is above the law”.

And what was the charge? It was the improbable claim that Trump’s misleading listing of a payoff of porn star Stormy Daniels as a “legal expense”, a misdemeanour under New York law, and past the statute of limitations, represented a breach of campaign finance laws, and represented an “illegal campaign contribution” as it could be argued the purpose of the funds was to safeguard his presidential run from scandal.

This extraordinary piece of legal reasoning would never have seen the light of day were it not for the concerted efforts of the Democratic Party machine to put Trump in a courtroom under any charge whatsoever, just so long as it was in time to keep him out of the White House. The judge is a supporter of the Democratic party, whose daughter’s charity has contracts with the Democratic Party. Trump’s lawyers requested he recuse himself — he refused. The trial was held in, and the jury drawn from, a district in which Trump polled at 5 per cent. A change of venue was requested — the judge refused. The prosecutor was, of course, an elected Democratic Party DA, and the originator of the arcane legal strategy which has somehow turned an 8 year old misdemeanour into a federal crime, for all that it was, with an added layer of confusion, being conducted in a state court.

It would be far too grand to call the process Kafkaesque — this was just a good old kangaroo court in which Trump’s political enemies got to pick the prosecution, judge and jury. Political prosecutions of this kind are sadly not uncommon in America, and have only become more prevalent in the age of partisanship and a politicised judiciary. But what is utterly, shockingly new is its naked use against a Presidential candidate. Nothing Trump across his entire, sordid career — not his handling of the Charlottesville riots, not even his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 elections — comes close to the level of damage this will inflict on the American body politic.

Much of the country was able to dismiss Trump’s claims of election rigging in 2020 as a case of sour grapes. But if Trump is prevented from campaigning because he is under house arrest, in court, or even in prison, and goes on to lose the election, his complaints will be fully vindicated. Half the country will not accept the result, and the resentment will fuel the populist right for decades to come.

But of course, this prosecution could easily help Trump. Polling has already suggested that a Trump conviction will not change minds — moderates are not going to suddenly flock to Biden because of this result. But it will mobilise and energise his core voters, and lend credibility to his populist messaging. Biden’s best hope, the narrative that won the 2020 election, was to cast Trump as a divisive failure, and himself as a competent peacemaker. That’s over now, for good.

So much for the immediate, grave political consequences. But the deeper implications are far more frightening. With naked political prosecutions reaching this new extreme, and extending even to former Presidents, nobody is safe. Biden may be the next one in a courtroom, should he lose this election — and years in court, and the risk of jail, could be the new normal for American leaders.

Talk of civil war in America is deeply silly at one level, but civil division and disorder need not be a literal battlefield to represent a catastrophe. The weaponisation of law and administration against political opponents is a lethal new development that will tear apart America. Nor will it stop at politicians. Organisations and campaigning groups will also come under the gun. You don’t just assassinate the leadership – you blow up the bridges, you bomb the infrastructure. Controversy is already raging on the US right about the dominance of liberals in the administrative state, and the use of the IRS to “target” conservative charities and groups. And after them? Ordinary people — from religious groups to individuals “cancelled” for saying or believing the wrong thing.

The dangerous thing about these narratives, is that even when untrue or exaggerated, they are self-fulfilling prophecies. The logic of escalation dictates that if one side believes the other will stop at nothing, then neither will they — and they seek to win by escalating further and faster. The Democratic Party believes Trump is a dictator in waiting, and thus are willing to incinerate the credibility of the courts if they think it will stop him. One can only imagine what norms Trump will be willing to discard in retribution.

And amidst all of this chaos and division, it will be the American people that lose out. Real problems — of economic inequality, global instability, urban decay and social breakdown — will be drowned out by the noise. Lives, families and communities will be torn apart by these divisions, or have their imaginations and minds narrowed by them. It will have to stop somewhere and somehow — someone will have to “write the end to it” — but that ending is now further off than ever.