Allow me to be blunt: I think most of the criminal charges against Donald Trump are bogus. They are the precise product of political gamesmanship by leftist, activist district attorneys (DAs) meant to pad their bona fides with their co-belligerents and garner awards at the next bar association meeting.

Let’s be honest. They don’t do anything to sway voters because of how transparent the effort to do so is. Even less likely is Trump seeing the inside a prison cell. The cases are far too weak for that. If anything, the number and flimsiness of the indictments, 91 felony charges last I checked, (enough for their own dedicated Wikipedia page), merely has the chance of making fence-sitters sympathize with an embattled Trump.

There’s a good reason that it’s a tried-and-true phrase in law that “you can indict a ham sandwich.” A motivated DA can indict anyone with any charge, since the DA controls the indictment process. The DA hand-picks the jury to return the indictment they want and shows them only the evidence that favor’s the state’s case, even if it would not admissible at trial. 

The process is non-adversarial. Very rarely, like in the famous case of JonBenét Ramsey, does a grand jury go “rogue” and defy the will of the charging DA. In that case, the DA did not want to prosecute, but the grand jury returned an indictment. All the same, the DA got the outcome he wanted by refusing to proceed to trial despite the indictment. So great is the DA’s discretion that nearly everything until the trial itself begins is a matter of choice. I daresay that if a DA today wanted to, they could get a grand jury to indict the late Queen Elizabeth with the murder of JFK using one of Napoleon’s pistols. It is that one-sided and stacked in favor of the charging DA.

So, the number of charges against Trump is meaningless to me and should be to you, too. Frankly, I’m surprised they stopped at 91. Why not go for 100? Why not 1,000? Bury the man if you want to. After all, if you come for the king, you best not miss. And he’s not called “Teflon Don” for nothing. So, let’s take a look at the highlights. For this article, “whataboutism” is not a dirty word. We live in times where one side is pursuing the other criminally for things they do. Alinsky would be proud of his progeny.

The political agenda: jamming Trump in the election

In New York, authorities indicted Trump on 34 charges related to “falsifying business records,” which allegedly involved payments made to the adult actress Stormy Daniels for services rendered. The former is particularly funny. Democrats have made a lot of hullabaloo over the story of a liaison between Daniels and Trump, all the while ignoring that Hunter Biden fathered a child with one of his favorite strippers. His father Joe Biden hardly acknowledges the existence of the child. The idea that money didn’t, and doesn’t, change hands for adult entertainment in the halls of power is laughable, but Trump is the one getting attacked for it.

On the strength of broad references to his efforts to “overturn the election,” Trump faces indictments relating to the January 6 protests in Georgia and the District of Columbia. I want to point out that Trump has not been indicted for the only crime that would matter here, insurrection, which refers to rebellion, despite the antiquity of the term “insurrection.” He is also facing charges of “fraud” and “racketeering.” (Please try to hear the sarcasm.)

Our country’s priestly caste openly brags about “The Secret Shadow Campaign that ‘Saved’ the 2020 Election,” despite Trump facing indictments for election fraud. They call their efforts “fortification” rather than the word they charge Trump with. “Racketeering” is another legal weasel word. A “pattern of unlawful activity” can really just mean “we’re gonna get you with something.” Prosecutors are charging Trump with things that wouldn’t disqualify him from office. They are fragile charges anyway, because prosecutors know the goal is not to put him away but to jam him up in this election. And let’s not forget that House Democrats have recently threatened not to certify a Trump win. You may want to remind yourself what the protestors wanted to happen on January 6, 2021.

The only indictments that hold any real water are the Florida classified documents case. After leaving office in 2021, Trump took classified documents home. There are genuine questions about the legality of this action. It’s not obvious that the president can simply declassify things on a whim, in the exercise of an executive prerogative, without any paperwork. There may be something genuinely here.

However, the government’s effort is again undermined by hypocrisy. When Hillary Clinton used a private, poorly secured email server for official business, she faced no consequences. When Joe Biden, after leaving his job as vice president in 2017, did the very same thing as Trump and walked home with classified documents, he faced no consequences either. The special prosecutor said in early February that even though Biden did, he can’t be charged with anything because he’s too old and senile for any prosecution to be successful. So, prosecutors will charge Trump forty times for something Democrats have also done but will not be charged for.

The end of political decency has already occurred

If I am beating this horse too much, please stop me. It looks pretty dead. Why does this sort of stuff bother me so much? It both does and doesn’t.

It doesn’t because I think Carl Schmitt was right when he wrote in his book The Concept of the Political that “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” I am well aware that those who rule us are our enemies and are not our friends. That is, it doesn’t bother me in the same way it doesn’t bother me when the lion gets the zebra on the nature documentary, that’s just lions being lions.

Still, it does bother me, because we’re not supposed to treat one another like lions and zebras treat each other. Even so, it does always bother me when the lion gets the zebra because horses are my favorite animal. It’s a tightrope of conflicting ideas about how the world does work versus how I think it should work. Maybe this is just my conventional, conservative heritage coming out in some last gasps at relevancy. It feels like we shouldn’t be doing this sort of thing to each other. But we are, and it won’t stop.

If you haven’t already come to the realization that Trump is being unfairly treated because he is Orange Man Bad, then you won’t today. I could write another entire article about why Trump, despite being a 1990’s blue-dog Democrat when it comes to policy, is so unacceptable to the Left. He’s not being treated the way he is because of his qualities as a person; remember that the Clintons were guests of honor at Trump’s wedding to Melania in 2005. He was the same person then as he is now; the leadership caste found him acceptable then and doesn’t now.

I must make a caveat here too. I don’t particularly like Trump as an individual. I find his mannerisms hilarious,and appreciate all he’s done for meme culture, but he is still a morally odious person. He’s uniquely, personally unworthy of the movement that has coalesced around him. But Trump doesn’t hate me as a person. Trump doesn’t despise me for who I am as a white, heterosexual, Christian man. Trump doesn’t want to dilute my political power with an immigrant vote bank. The same cannot be said for the administrative state that stands in opposition to him. You go to war with the army and the general you have, not the one you wished you had. The opposition thinks this way too, just in the direction back at me.

That’s the concept of the political for you.

[Liam Roman edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.