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Donald Trump wasted no time declaring his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election. The announcement elicited a wide range of reactions. Days later, the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to head the criminal probes into the former president’s actions surrounding the 2020 election and his alleged possession of classified documents. Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten says the Trump special counsel is all about political prosecution and threatens to undermine faith in our democracy.
This is the impact of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel, which makes the prospect of the former president being charged and convicted of something, anything, more real than ever before. They really do want to “lock him up,” or at least hold that threat over his head for maximum political gain. There are many layers to the surreal, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” lawfare assault on Trump…all worth peeling back.
For starters, we have the Third World nature of a president pursuing criminal charges against his predecessor and present challenger – an extension of the Third World Soviet show trial-style January 6 committee preceding it, and carried out by a law enforcement apparatus that has time and again acted, Third World-like, as the ruling class’s sword and shield. That Third Worldism in our politics has now been normalized, and institutionalized – at least when it comes to how the ruling class will take on its foes, epitomized by Trump.
Then there are the beyond dubious grounds on which the pursuit is putatively based, namely a document dispute – as even federal law enforcement has acknowledged by leak – that Trump was taking mementos back to his home in Mar-A-Lago, not that there was some nefarious plot around them…and the manner in which Trump contested the 2020 election.
These kinds of charges have never been pursued to this degree, novel charges, against a presidential candidate before, let alone a former president before, let alone in the middle of a campaign. If our prosecutors actually acted with discretion, they would never in a million years pursue cases like these, against a Trump, and at this time.
