Two weeks after the quasi-reenactment of D-Day on the grounds of one of the grandest and most famous homes in America, Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s home and club at Palm Beach (a community regularly referred to by Richard Nixon as “that pocket of poverty”), it is clear that it was a desperation shot by the vast and now chronically frightened coalition of Trump-haters.

Deploying this kind of force on so prominent a target on an archives and records case is nonsense, and the whole country knows it. Were there anything at all to justify such an action or support of the prosecution that is supposedly under consideration, the Mississippi River of malicious leaks that flows out of the Justice Department and the FBI in Trump matters would have the anti-Trump press grimly speaking of “walls closing in” and the ”drip, drip, drip” of damaging evidence.

Perhaps Jeff Zucker, Chris Wallace, and Brian Stelter, three ne plus ultra practitioners of that activity at CNN, until they involuntarily sought more time with their families, are still offering such reflections (if only to their families).

It appears also to be clear enough that the American political and financial and high-tech and media and intellectual and entertainment establishments, having been taken completely by surprise by Mr. Trump’s win in 2016, spontaneously resolved to harass the Trump administration into ineffectiveness and resort to an unprecedented range of methods to ensure that Mr. Trump was not reelected.

The Covid pandemic furnished the opportunity for the generation of public hysteria through the incompetence and venality of the public health administration establishment that was used to justify likely unconstitutional changes in the voting and vote counting methods in a number of swing states. (They were frequently not enacted by the state legislatures, as the Constitution requires.)

This, added to out-spending Trump two-to-one and enjoying the support of 95 percent of the national political press, and the stark refusal of the judiciary at any level to judge the constitutional issues on their merits, enabled Mr. Trump’s enemies to push him out of office by the narrowest of margins.

Mr. Trump’s enemies have made two terrible mistakes: in order not to frighten the voters or disrupt the rickety coalition of anti-Trump forces in 2020, they accepted a radical socialist election platform and chose candidates for president and vice president who were unfrightening but that are clearly not competent to fill those offices.

The consequent inept performance of the administration was widely predicted, including in this column. Since Mr. Trump’s enemies never understood that the source of his popularity was not just gimcrack showmanship, though there was an element of that, but much more importantly his insight into the profound public resentment of the economic and foreign-policy failures of the Clinton-George W. Bush-Obama years, they had no idea how to deal with it.

The endless, fruitless Middle Eastern wars, the greatest economic disaster in the world since the Great Depression, corrupt reluctance to deal with an intolerable immigration crisis on the southern border, (oversimplifying only slightly, the Republicans like the cheap labor and the Democrats like the votes), a sleazy bipartisan establishment that disdained the lower socioeconomic half of the country as “deplorables,” overly dependent “on guns and religion” (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama). 

All this generated immense resentment that Mr. Trump alone detected, and then exploited. Contrary to universal predictions, he was a good president: not a racist, not a warmonger, an effective if awkward leader who practically ended illegal immigration, unemployment, oil imports, and even North Korean misbehavior.

Now the country is divided between an establishment that is as fanatically determined as ever to bar Mr. Trump’s way back to the presidency, and an army of his supporters joined by a steadily increasing number of authentic independents who are less and less horrified by Trump and more and more distressed by the official abuses and outright lawlessness of his enemies.

This is the equation that will have to be finalized: Mr. Trump is the irresistible force while his enemies are the immovable object. Since they are losing the policy battle, they fall back on their chief tool for the last five years: the use of the prosecutorial apparatus and if necessary the intelligence agencies, in grossly and unprecedentedly improper fashion to incite the public view that Mr. Trump is a lawbreaker, and if possible to find some plausible grounds to indict him.

It is clear from the continuing, blusteringly confident assertions of Mr. Trump’s enemies that they are convinced that he is a wicked man and that accordingly any mobilization of the forces of justice and intelligence to frustrate and defeat him are justified. The end — preventing Mr. Trump’s return to the White House — will justify any means short of assassination, if that.

It is hard not to assume that the ludicrous assault on Mr. Trump’s home was not this mealymouthed attorney general’s response (Merrick Garland’s) to President Biden’s call, publicly disclosed (by the New York Times) demand for a prosecution of Mr. Trump, and this bunk about presidential records and archives was the best he could do.

After all the investigations that have been hurled at Donald Trump, if his enemies had any legitimate legal complaint, they would have made it by now. Instead, we had the colossal fraud of Russian collusion, the two most spurious presidential impeachments in the country’s history, and this totalitarian mockery of a bipartisan inquiry into the hooliganism at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In the January 6 Committee, the president has no supporters, the witnesses read off teleprompters with something less than convincing spontaneity, and it is nothing but a defamatory mudslinging operation from A to Z. The bone-crushing defeat of Congresswoman Liz Cheney in her home state last week may be taken as a reasonable reflection of the level of credence the public attaches to the disgraceful January 6 hearings.

On the evidence, the ultimate guardrails of the system are in place: in approximately the same measure that the judiciary would not run any risk of overturning the apparent result of a presidential election, the prosecution service will balk at launching an evidently unfounded and entirely politically motivated indictment of a former president who is now the most likely candidate to win the next presidential election.

If there is such an indictment, Mr. Trump could run for president and be elected anyway, and the Democratic nibelungen in the Justice Department should not imagine that so dishonest a prosecution could have any ultimate outcome but the complete discreditation and downfall of those who launched it. Mr. Trump is not blameless, but the Democrats are mainly responsible for this political illness, and they will have to take the medicine, one way or another.