A democracy that uses the criminal justice system to destroy partisan opponents is on the verge of constitutional suicide. President Trump, the day after his most recent indictment, stated that the country was now being governed by “fascists, crooks, and thugs.”  Unfortunately, that claim has the ring of truth.

Almost all of the present complaint is a Presidential Records Act matter, a non-criminal statute which is not mentioned in the indictment, and almost all the evidence is extorted, in the manner of American prosecutors-by threats of indictment and promises of immunity for perjury. This is why 98 percent of U.S federal prosecutions are successful, 95 percent of those without a trial — it isn’t a justice system, just a conveyer belt to the bloated and corrupt prison system. 

This pseudo-judicial assassination attempt on Mr. Trump contrasts starkly with the Get Out of Jail Free cards for Secretary Clinton and President Biden for much more serious offenses.  Mrs. Clinton opened hundreds of classified documents to the world and destroyed 33,000 subpoenaed emails. 

Mr. Biden, who, evidence suggests, ran an illegal international influence-peddling operation with his family, wrongly removed herniating masses of classified documents from his less entitled positions of senator and vice president. The whitewash of the Clinton and Biden illegalities, including the silence of the grand jury that has supposedly been investigating the Bidens for nearly four years, are themselves, crimes.

We are at the precipice because the post-Nixon addiction to trying to turn the presidency into an ejector seat when both houses of Congress are controlled by the other party spread easily: politicians are generally weak and succumb easily to bad habits. Yet the practice exploded when the sleazy bipartisan political class realized that they should stop splitting their sides laughing at Trump’s buffoonery in 2016 and recognized what a threat he was to their log-rolling and back-scratching society in Washington.

The criminalization of political differences suddenly received a gigantic gain-of-function booster when it was mixed with the overpowering intoxicant of Trump-hate. As it emerged that Trump was the only prominent person who recognized the depth of discontent in the American working and middle classes, and the chronic failure of the post-Reagan Republicans to address those concerns, neither the Democrats nor the Never Trump Republicans replied with policy changes or a serious effort to reverse the inroads Trump was making, and win back the votes that were slipping away.

The system was already too rotten for that. The Clinton campaign responded with the Steele Dossier, the infamous pastiche of lies and defamations that was falsely represented as legitimate intelligence. The Trump-Russian collusion fraud almost immobilized Mr. Trump for more than two years.

When this immense and putrefied canard finally expired, Mr. Trump’s enemies moved briskly on to the most spurious presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history. The charge was that in neutrally asking the president of Ukraine by telephone and with dozens of people on the call, to find out what happened in the Biden family‘s business dealings in Ukraine, he, Mr. Trump, committed a high crime and a misdemeanor equivalent to treason by making development assistance to Ukraine contingent upon the president of Ukraine producing incriminating evidence against the Bidens. 

In the 2020 election, the Democrats, ostensibly to facilitate voting during the Covid pandemic, altered voting and vote counting rules in a number of swing states by state executive fiat or the action of state courts dominated by democratic appointees, and not, as the Constitution requires, by the state legislatures. 

This amplified the use of voting by mail, raising concerns of ballot harvesting, and making the election outcome dependent upon 40 million ballots that could not be verified or traced reliably from the person who allegedly filled out the ballot to the point where they were tabulated. A flip of 50,000 votes in three states would have given Trump the election.

Yet as he has done a number of times, Mr. Trump inadvertently came to the rescue of his enemies by allowing them to represent the unserious efforts of Mayor Giuliani as the principal Trump argument against the validity of the 2020 election result. The judiciary abdicated as a co-equal branch of government by refusing to judge on their merits the numerous lawsuits on the constitutionality of the voting and vote counting changes..

The Democrats and the Never Trumpers assumed Mr. Trump was finished. The dreadful Trump meteor had passed. Yet he now leads all the polls, among Republicans and against Mr. Biden, and the Trump-haters are desperate. There may be more prosecutions, as it is all the Democrats have left, apart from ballot harvest theft.

Mr. Trump can probably get the fatuous New York criminal action pitched, and may be able to get rid of most of this one also. The same prosecutor, a rabid partisan (whose wife produced an idolatrous film about Michelle Obama), may yet try to flog the dead horse of January 6, but they don’t have any case against Mr. Trump, and the Justice Department’s credibility is evaporating. Mr. Trump’s enemies have opened the kimono and revealed themselves in their ghastly moral infirmity, as being, indeed, “fascists, crooks, and thugs.” 

The invertebrate Trump-hating Republicans who were useful doormats for the Democrats by impersonating an opposition, are already coming to light. National Review has effectively pronounced Trump guilty. Comments such as those from Governors Hutchinson, who is polling one per cent, and Sununu, who trails Mr. Trump by thirty points in his home state of New Hampshire, but shouts at any nearby camera that Mr. Trump can’t win, will fall away. Governor Christie is trying to be a human torpedo aimed at Trump, but is merely floundering.

Mr. Trump’s followers will not desert him and any Republican candidate who implies that Mr. Trump is guilty will vanish as if through a trap-door. If he can’t get rid of these ridiculous charges without trying them, Mr. Trump should take dilatory procedures to ensure they are not tried before the election. The Senator McConnell-Ambassador Haley attempt to duck the issue with unctuous noises about assessing the evidence won’t fly; a Republican can wait and see on the verdict but has to condemn the timing and probable motive of the indictment, and the contrast with the treatment of the Bidens and Clintons.

Mr. Trump should promise not to pardon himself and face the charges after his next term. If the Republicans can counter-attack effectively on ballot harvesting, Mr. Trump should win. His opponents are as he described them and the public still objects in principle to persecution of the innocent and to shredding the Constitution.

Whatever happens, Mr. Trump has now received more votes for president than anyone else in history. He is an improbable defender of American political ideals; ideally the role thrust on him would be played by a less blemished character, but this office has sought this man.

No one should under-estimate what is at stake. If America is to become a permanent ballot-stuffing prosecutocracy, it is finished as the project its founders launched and Lincoln and other great men have preserved. It would lose all moral authority and take all of Western Civilization down with it. 

This is what the ethical bankruptcy of the Democrats is in danger of achieving. Lincoln famously said that the United States would never be invaded, yet “as a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” That is now the choice, and that day of judgment is almost at hand.