Former President Donald J. Trump is in serious legal trouble.
This isn’t the “walls are closing in” proclamations that never came to fruition that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow kept promising us during the early days of the Trump presidency.
A List of Legal Horribles
Those claims, mostly predicated upon the obviously false notion that Trump was somehow compromised by Russian intelligence, were purely salacious and designed to galvanize what was at that time the dispirited Left. The current spate of indictments and legal headaches that the forty-fifth president is facing, unfortunately for him, are not merely witch hunts to be ignored.
Sure, the Manhattan district attorney’s indictment over his alleged hush money payments to a pornographic film actress, Stormy Daniels, in 2016 was a politicized mess.
That case was rightly derided as a “zombie case” that should have never been brought forward—and would not have been, had the defendant been anyone other than Donald Trump. Alas, it was Trump in the hotseat. What’s more, it was but the start of Trump’s legal woes.
Next up for Trump was the civil case against E. Jean Carroll. A New York-based reporter who accused Trump of having sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, Carroll won her civil suit against the former president.
Trump was found liable of battery (sexual assault, in this case) and was ordered to hand over $5 million for having publicly defamed Carroll in the process of the civil suit. While any accusation of this sort is serious, this, too, was something Trump had the power to defend himself on in a serious way and work to prove he was innocent.
But, when taken together with the wider tapestry of Trump’s legal problems it doesn’t help Mr. Trump in the slightest.
More recently, Trump was indicted by a Washington, D.C. grand jury for having mishandled classified documents. According to polls, most Americans believe that Trump violated the law—and that those violations were “serious.”
As an aside, President Joe Biden is also facing a serious inquiry into claims that he, too, mishandled classified documents throughout the course of his long tenure in government. It is only the forty-fifth president who has been indicted, though. I have serious doubts that the current president will suffer anything more than a mild headache in the press for his purported crimes.
Sadly for Donald Trump, the American people are not in a forgiving mood. They recognize the inherent unfairness of how Trump is being treated compared to Biden.
Rather than support ending the investigations into Trump if the same kind of investigations won’t be seriously launched into Biden, however, most Americans polled want to see both Trump and Biden seriously prosecuted.
If only.
A Never-Ending List of Indictments
Trump says that “more [indictments] could be coming” down the pike. Indeed, they are. Because there is presently a grand jury investigation into accusations that the former president attempted to unduly influence the 2020 Presidential Election count in Georgia.
Infamously, Trump placed a call to the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding that the governor find him “just 11,780 votes” to return Trump to the presidency.
It is more than likely, given the audio evidence involved in that case, that the forty-fifth president will be indicted by that grand jury as well. President Trump believes that these indictments are funny; that they will empower his ultimate victory.
With these indictments mounting, Trump can call all of them political witch hunts and play up the victim card—simultaneously playing the victim and pretending to be the smartest, toughest man in the room are hallmarks of Trumpism.
Trump’s calculations on the matter are partly correct.
Sure, he can gain support from likely Republican voters by doing the whole, “Woe is me!” act when it comes to unfair indictments. Beyond the Republican Presidential Primary, though, there is a great concern that Trump cannot appeal to anywhere near enough independents to beat the Democrats.
The indictments may propel Donald Trump to victory in the GOP Primary. They will not bring Trump ultimate victory. And the more that Trump suffers through legal problems—which will be running concurrently with his fledgling presidential campaign—the less likely that he’ll be able to defeat Joe Biden, whose purported illegal behavior has been masked for years by the media.
Trump’s Path Forward (It Gets Boring)
A solution for the Donald is to stop fixating on the indictments. Stop looking at them as a bizarre point of pride. Donald Trump must instead start going hard after Joe Biden and focusing on advocating for the policies that will make America great again. Only then will Trump have a clear return path into the White House. More indictments will not help him.
By the way, this is why the Democrats are giddily supporting the politicization of the Department of Justice (DOJ), because it serves their nefarious ends for the acquisition of absolute power no matter what. Far from helping the former president, then, his indictments are only harming him. If he isn’t more careful, they will hinder his incipient campaign for the presidency in 2024, too.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
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