I have seen an alarming tend in national politics that is alarmingly picking up steam: why is it that—largely on the left (if I am inaccurate, show me the case)—when one side fears losing an election, they try to throw the book at him or her?
The current euphemism for this is called “lawfare.” According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, lawfare is defined as “the use of legal action to cause problems for an opponent.”
During the primary elections last spring, it appeared that every time Trump won a primary, a progressive district attorney from a distant state would bring together some ambiguous laws piecemealed together to charge him.
Slowly, those cases are being methodically thrown out on appeals. The The one that suck were the 94 charges brought against him in New York over actions in which there was no victim let alone the fact that no one could directly say which law was being broken.
So Trump was charged with dozens of felonies by a DA who literally campaign on bring down Trump, heard by “a jury of peers” in New York City where people will find a cheeseburger guilty if it had an (R) after its name, before a New York City judge who court proceedings were eyebrow raising (apparently a unanimous verdict doesn’t have to mean unanimous). Honestly I almost felt the judge, feeling there was no basis for the charges but also didn’t want to be the judge famous for letting Trump of, so he made ridiculous and appealable rulings in order to make some appeals court throw it out (it is getting harder and harder to not be a conspiracy theorist these days). No one believed he would be found guilty.
And that was by design.
What the left wanted and got was a guilty verdict so Trump could be labeled a felon. I still hear that word occasionally being thrown around, bur hasn’t stuck outside of, say, MSNBC. Most Americans felt the conviction bogus. The problem is the left overplayed their lawfare strategy. The consensus among detached legal scholars seems to be that no one would be charged with these “crimes” if their name wasn’t Trump.
It seems off. And the felon label didn’t stick.
Here’s the problem with that. Americans will no longer trust the judiciary in general because of games like these. The left might win the battles in this strategy but ultimately lose the war for public trust (kind of like Public Health after covid).
Sadly, this is lawfare is occurring in Montana as I speak. Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen is currently in some kind of ethics hearing for something they claim he did wrong.
The council (who is made up of officials who openly hate him) hearing the case are clearly making judgments designed to harm his arguments. If they rule against him—which face it, they will—they could recommend disbarring him, which they likely will. The MT supreme court could hear the appeal, but they collectively hate him. And mind you, he hasn’t done anything that literally every AG in the country, Democrat or Republican, hasn’t done, but as Joseph Stalin infamously said “show me the man I’ll show you the crime.”
The bigger problem with what is going on is that while these officials are busy patting themselves on the back for bringing down hated opponents, trust in government is hemorrhaging among the American people.
The government needs to start being honorable again to try to get that trust back. No political victory is worth the loss of that trust.
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