OPINION:
Coincidences happen in twos. When they come in threes, fours and more, then we have to think it is less by happenstance than by design.
That’s the lesson from the steadily expanding prosecutorial pursuits of former President Donald Trump, which — with ample time and opportunity to come to culmination over the last several years — are coming to a head during the 2024 election season.
The former president (and, worth noting for the sake of American civics, the eminently plausible future president) now faces a trial in late spring and early summer 2024. It will come right at the close of the Republican primary season when precisely this event could sway a close race.
Expect more legal processes to be stacked into the summer and autumn of next year, just in time to affect the general election. There is no sense in leaving things to chance.
There’s something to be said for the proposition, stripped of context, that no one is immune to the law and that the law does not respect elections or politics. But we do not live outside of context.
The context is one of naked iniquity: One party’s (probable) nominee is going to trial on legally dubious grounds.
On the other hand, the other’s (again probable) nominee enjoys exceptional deference from the prosecutorial gaze.
Law enforcement and its apparatus turned a blind eye — and even, in several high-profile and deeply shameful cases, issued excuses for— that nominee’s corrupt foreign connections in the 2020 cycle.
They are doing so again in the 2024 cycle, even as evidence steadily mounts that the current president of the United States has serious questions to answer about his involvement in the copious Ukrainian money flowing through his son in the pursuit of their own interests.
(Pause and consider the irony here that the inquiry for which Mr. Trump was impeached — in requesting information on the Biden family’s Ukrainian dealings — turns out to have been wholly justified.)
Here, I ask the question I bring to nearly every evaluation of media and deep-state fixation: What if Mr. Trump did it?
As always, we know the answer. If there were documentary evidence, plus a money trail showing one of Mr. Trump’s children selling access to their father on behalf of foreign oligarchs, it would be topic No. 1 in media and government alike.
This is hypothetical but not meaningfully speculative: A press that reported with avid credulity every passing rumor about Mr. Trump would have assuredly pursued this to the hilt. They don’t do it with President Biden, and that tells you something.
In a just world, the current president and his mouthpieces would be constantly bombarded with only two questions: What did you know about your son’s business dealings, and how many grandchildren do you have?
Of course, neither will happen, and it is important to understand why.
We do not move from a discussion of prosecutorial discretion to disparities in media coverage as a deflection here: We do it because they are part of the same phenomenon and the same apparatus.
The powers of the state and its handmaidens are brought to bear against Mr. Trump and for Mr. Biden because those networks are aligned against everything the former stands for and aligned with everything the latter represents.
Aggressive skepticism of controlling institutions — not election denial and certainly not insurrection — is the real indictment against Mr. Trump. Those institutions have their champion, and they know it.
They also have their timing, which is why we see events unfold now as they do. It is not a subtle application of power, nor even necessarily a productive one.
In the Republican primary field, there is every possibility that legal persecution will simply increase former Mr. Trump’s popularity and guarantee the outcome the persecutors seek to avoid.
But then, it is not the best and the brightest coming together to keep him out of power. It is a bureaucratic class seized by an intellectual monoculture, and therefore a blunt instrument at best.
Americans who see the former president as their bulwark know the score all too well.
The bad news is that the pursuit will continue. But there is good news, and not just in the realm of electoral possibilities.
There are policy solutions that strike at the heart of this apparatus — and we have a chance to pursue them now, independent of the vicissitudes of any election season.
Even as I write, previously unheard-of policy possibilities have opened up in a variety of spheres, including in a wholesale reform or even breakup of the administration’s enforcement mechanism at the FBI and the implementation of the so-called Schedule F apparatus in the federal civil service.
Reforms like this — subordinating the administrative state to its proper place in American civics, accountable to the people rather than to the governing class — are the necessary systemic changes America requires.
The point is not to save Mr. Trump from his persecutors — after all, they have an exceptionally poor record of stopping him across decades — but to save the American people from those who would rule them.
In this, we see the true significance of the trials of Mr. Trump. Those trials are less a window into him and his future and much more a signifier of the plans the regime has laid for you and me.
That’s why they’re after him.
• Brooke Leslie Rollins is president and CEO of America First Policy Institute.
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