OPINION:
In April of last year, when New York’s Democratic prosecutor Alvin Bragg indicted former President Donald Trump on lapsed federal charges from eight years earlier involving byzantine campaign finance regulations and relying on testimony from deeply corrupted witnesses, Mr. Trump looked like a finished man.
He was down in the polls against President Biden. He faced a field of Republican candidates eager to topple him. And Mr. Bragg’s case was just one of five serious felony court cases Mr. Trump faced before the 2024 presidential election.
Politicians, pundits and newsmen lustily drew up Mr. Trump’s political obituary. By all accounts, Mr. Trump appeared far more likely to spend the rest of his life in the big house than to find his way back into the White House.
But Mr. Trump’s entire life has been a gamble. Fear is not something that occupies his mind. He is not troubled by the emergence of insurmountable obstacles before him.
If his books about his business life were called “The Art of the Deal” and then “The Art of the Comeback,” the book about his political life should be called “The Art of the Possible. “
Today, Mr. Trump is on the cusp of recapturing the White House — if the polls are to be believed. In both national polling and polls conducted in key swing states, Mr. Trump is poised to beat Mr. Biden in November.
He has miraculously run the table on four of the five felony court cases brought against him by partisan Democratic prosecutors. The only case Mr. Trump will face before the election will be the current goofball case brought by Mr. Bragg and argued by President Biden’s former No. 3 man at the Department of Justice.
In addition to jailing Mr. Trump before the election, this Bragg case was designed to make Mr. Trump unelectable and humiliate him and his family with the tawdry tales involving a porn actress, tabloid journalists and a disbarred serial perjurer.
Instead, the case has become a humiliation for Mr. Biden, Mr. Bragg and the hotly partisan judge running the case.
Democrats and commentators alike are feverishly trying to distance Mr. Biden from the case, claiming he had nothing to do with bringing the charges against the former president. In truth, powerful Democrats from the White House on down have been directing the judicial persecution of Mr. Trump since he first became their political nemesis back in 2015.
Anyway, the fact that Democrats are so intent on protecting Mr. Biden from this court case demonstrates how dramatically the political fortunes have turned. And of course, Mr. Trump’s political recovery has most certainly been buoyed by the obvious unfairness of the ridiculous court cases.
You know a court case is really falling apart when partisan Judge Juan Merchan becomes enraged and finds himself in a staring contest with an effective defense witness.
“Are you staring me down?” the judge hysterically demanded of the witness before clearing the courtroom earlier this week, according to the court transcript.
“I want to discuss proper decorum in my courtroom,” he then raged at the witness. “You don’t give me side eye, and you don’t roll your eyes!”
That exchange this week very well may go down as the moment all the Democratic strategies to destroy Mr. Trump fell apart.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump is headed to the Democratic Party’s strongest political beachhead in the South Bronx for a political rally. The idea that Mr. Trump could win the Bronx, New York City, or even the state of New York in November’s election is unthinkable. Not possible.
But then again, so was the possibility that Mr. Trump would be standing here today a free man and on the verge of recapturing the White House.
Such is “The Art of the Possible” with Mr. Trump.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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