We are committed to sorting out for our readers this unprecedented gauntlet of prosecutorial action.
What’s real, and what’s hyperbole? It is not always easy to tell in the unprecedented lawfare campaign being pursued against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee by Democratic prosecutors — including the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department of the incumbent president, who just happens to be the presumptive Democratic nominee.
The one thing you can bank on is that National Review will sort it out and give it to you straight. But we need your help, and we are asking our readers to consider donating to support this work as part of our ongoing webathon.
The lawfare campaign I just mentioned has been humming for a couple of years. Much of that has been preliminary scutwork, preparing to make civil suits and criminal indictments a daily fact of life in the 2024 campaign.
A pernicious development in American politics and governance? Absolutely. Still, that doesn’t mean former president Trump’s opposition has manufactured the cases against him — at least not all of them. As always, he is part victim and part his own worst enemy.
The Supreme Court cases are a prime example. It’s only March, yet the justices have already had to intervene twice in 2024 electoral politics. The last thing they want is entanglement in this web, just like every sensible American should want no part of a system in which incumbent partisans exploit legal processes to force the courts into the posture of deciding elections.
It’s the dream of progressives: If they win the cases, the public is denied the right to elect leaders the Left opposes; if they lose the cases, they agitate to pack the Supreme Court and turn it into a super-legislature that imposes the progressive policy wish list — an objective, by the way, that they are closer to achieving than FDR ever was.
Former president Trump would have you think everything is rigged against him. His opponents would have you think Trump’s appointed judges have rigged everything in his favor. They are both wrong, of course, as self-interested spin on complex legal issues is wont to be.
A few days back, the justices turned aside a scheme to remove the former president from the ballot under the 14th Amendment by branding him as an “insurrectionist” — despite the small inconvenience that neither Trump nor any of the over 1,200 people prosecuted over the events of January 6, 2021, has even been charged with, let alone convicted of, the insurrection crime that’s been on the books for nearly 150 years. Trump supporters swooned about the majesty of American justice, and the commentariat seethed.
A few weeks from now, though, when the Court tackles Trump’s claim to be immune from criminal prosecution, expect the roles to be reversed. The thing is, the Court won’t have changed. How to go about sorting right from wrong won’t have changed.
And rest assured, we won’t have changed.
No legal eagle in America analyzed the 14th Amendment issue more comprehensively than our Dan McLaughlin. Our editorials called it, too — why it was a pernicious gambit and why the justices, though philosophically diverse, would lopsidedly reject it.
The same deep NR coverage has grappled scrupulously with presidential immunity: how the principle of placing no one above the law has lived harmoniously for over two centuries with a norm against subjecting presidents to prosecution; how politicized prosecutions challenge that harmony just as abuse of executive power does; why the justices were right to take the immunity case, despite howling from Trump’s opponents, and why they would be right to reject sweeping immunity claims, despite howling from Trump’s supporters.
That is what you’re going to get from NR, every day. And understand: It’s going to be every day.
The former president and his company have been under prosecution and lawsuits by elected progressive Democrats in New York for three years. Now, with the 2024 campaign in full swing, the presumptive GOP nominee faces the possibility of nine months tethered to courtrooms — in late March, a six-week state criminal trial in Manhattan; after that, the Biden Justice Department’s special counsel is pushing to try him in Florida in July and, astonishingly, in Washington, D.C., from around Labor Day through Election Day in November.
It’s an unprecedented gauntlet. And it’s a mixed bag: a crusade to use courts as a proxy for failed impeachment, to transmogrify morally and politically appalling conduct into imprisonable crime by tenuous prosecutorial theories, and — through selective prosecution and the sheer number of cases — to beat an opponent into submission, heedless of what the demolition of due process portends for the rule of law.
We intend to stay all over this, clarifying what’s real and what’s theater. As ever, we can’t do it without you. Without sugarcoating it, if you appreciate what we’re doing and want us to keep doing it, we need your help.
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