OPINION:
Donald Trump’s detractors harp about him pulling $50 million in PAC donor money to fight a barrage of Democrats’ legal attacks designed to put him in prison this year. But he’s not only doing himself a big favor. He is trying to protect the conservative movement from a predatory President Biden and the Democratic Party.
If they can win by persecuting him and his voters, the next threat Republican candidate better watch out.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, his remaining GOP presidential foe, dinged him on “Saturday Night Live,” a show that has a Republican viewership of roughly seven. “Do you need to borrow some money?” she said in a conversation with a Trump impersonator.
Let’s leave Ms. Haley and get back to reality. Mr. Biden and his law enforcement/bureaucratic arsenal, and his Democratic Party, are in constant attack mode to delegitimize an entire voting class — millions of Trump voters. The assault’s components: Mr. Biden’s diatribes painting the MAGA movement as a national enemy who will need F-16 fighter jets to take him on, the surveillance and censorship state who harasses MAGA, and the FBI.
Mr. Trump is setting a stand-your-ground example for indicted pro-life demonstrators, for FBI-surveilled Catholics and the parents of school-age children, for conservative targets of Biden censorship and deplatforming, for supporters surveilled by the Treasury Department because they have referred to MAGA.
He’s even fighting for a fellow billionaire, Elon Musk. Mr. Musk took away the liberals’ favorite plaything and censoring tool, Twitter, renamed it X, and immediately saw Biden apparatchiks unleashing regulatory assaults.
Mr. Trump is also taking on a Democratic Party as it forms its own nationhood. Not an American nation, but a political party nation complete with its own authoritarian ideologies. Most notable are diversity, equity and inclusion. DEI wipes away the American aim of equality in favor of tyranny.
The Democratic Party is awash in left-wing billionaire cash, which funds candidates, officeholders and a huge network of activists. Why do you think Mr. Biden opened our border to unknown drug cartel-directed invaders? For one, billionaire donor George Soros detests our national sovereignty. He has sent money to open-border nonprofits.
Democrats harass and, at the same time, want to enlarge the nine-member Supreme Court until it’s a party functionary.
Grassroots groups are methodically degrading U.S. citizenship, looking for ways to let foreigners vote by cleansing registration of just about any ID requirement. Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic bill in January 2022 to take over state elections. One mandate: Any name and address held in a federal database should be sent to states for voter registration.
Meanwhile, state Democrats are taking Mr. Trump off the ballot. If they set that precedent, they can win the presidency just by ballot erasure alone.
And the party justice machine.
Democrats know that urban America is home to a big heat island (a climate change term) of leftist judges, prosecutors and jury pools. Look at the Jan. 6 defendants put through the meat grinder for spending a few minutes strolling inside the U.S. Capitol. Now Mr. Biden’s U.S. attorney for the District wants to start hunting down Trump supporters who hung out around the Capitol but never entered.
In Democrat-soaked Manhattan, Soros-sponsored prosecutor Alvin Bragg has charged Mr. Trump with bookkeeping crimes related to a nondisclosure agreement with a former Playboy model. Mr. Bragg, at one time, dropped the idea.
New York state’s attorney general, Letitia James, is trying to ruin Mr. Trump’s 50-year-old Trump Organization. He overvalued property to win loans, the elected Democrat alleges. No bank has complained — a supposed fraud in search of a victim. If Democrats will ruin a politician’s lifelong family business over repaid debts, they will ruin any conservative.
At the Merrick Garland federal level, special counsel Jack Smith raided Mr. Trump’s Florida home and indicted him for classified document crimes. A president has broad powers to declassify and possess White House files. (No fed raided Mr. Biden’s office or home where he stacked his stolen top-secret files. No fed raided Hillary Clinton’s New York estate, where she sent reams of State Department emails to her own computer server, including classified stuff.)
In the District, Mr. Smith has indicted Mr. Trump for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot he says was a conspiracy against the American people. Over Mr. Trump’s objections, he subpoenaed every Twitter account that interacted with Mr. Trump’s. With this move, Mr. Smith is creating a Justice Department database of the MAGA world.
Conservatives, do you see why Mr. Trump’s battle is about more than his self-preservation?
Another Garland special counsel, Robert Hur, on Feb. 5 announced he would not charge Mr. Biden with mishandling classified files. His argument: A jury in the District would never convict the old man.
Mr. Hur wrote: “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
President Biden, of course, has no such empathy.
In November 2022, at the White House, Mr. Biden remotely ordered his Justice Department to destroy Mr. Trump.
“We just have to demonstrate that he will not take power if he does run,” he said. “I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again.”
Note the “we” and “I’m making sure.”
Mr. Biden is turning us into a Third World country in more ways than a cartel-fed open border.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.