Though I often write about President Trump in the United States, I generally avoid that subject here in Canada because Mr. Trump is so profoundly misunderstood and discreditable motives are often imputed to me.

I am generally supportive of him despite his infelicities, because I believe the United States was terribly misgoverned in the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama years and, in policy terms, Trump was an effective and successful president and will probably be so again.

He was also a congenial business associate and cordial acquaintance, and we have long shared, from experience, a dislike of the ability of American prosecutors to abuse the plea-bargain system, to extort and suborn false inculpatory evidence with impunity and grant immunity from perjury charges to “cooperating witnesses,” as they confirm Lord Acton’s famous aphorism that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

I will write no more today about his record as president. What an astonished world is watching is a double drama. It is the predictable conjunction of the irresistible political temptation in the United States to criminalize policy differences with the cold terror of the OBushinton establishment which misgoverned the country for over 20 years, that the ultimate political outsider they thought they had dispatched is almost the presumptive next president, unless they can derail him by manipulating the rancidly corrupt American criminal justice system

The first half of the drama is the now familiar technique of trying to destroy an American politician by prosecutorial abuse and the second is the spectacle of a political establishment that retains the energy to defend itself fiercely, but is so paranoid and cowardly that its methods are finally provoking the puritanical conscience of America.

That conscience is invisible most of the time, under the endless venality, hyperbole, coarseness, and hucksterism of the American system. Yet at a certain point, that profound attachment to the American mythos of truth and virtue always returns to protect America from the less salubrious traits of its nature.

Abraham Lincoln evoked it when he said that the evil of slavery would be abolished, even if “all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn by the lash will be repaid by a drop of blood drawn with the lash.”

Woodrow Wilson evoked that puritanical conscience when in 1917 he responded to the German sinking of American merchant vessels with his war message to Congress, which concluded: “The world must be made safe for democracy … To such a task we can dedicate our Eves and our fortunes, every thing that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”

Lyndon Johnson, when he championed the civil and voting rights of African-Americans, aroused the conscience of America when he told the Congress and the nation that it was not just African-Americans, “it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

It is unlikely that the current attempt to destroy Mr. Trump’s electability by frivolous and vexatious and defamatory officious legal harassment will generate any memorable speeches, and the former president is far from the sort of unusually virtuous person to whom moral leadership comes naturally.

He has, though, been the most conspicuous subject of the shameful abuse of the American legal system of any political leader in that country’s history. The painful informal coalition of the Democratic left, complacent displaced country club Republicans, the woke faddists, the nihilistic hooligans, and their collective echo chamber in the addled academy and most of the morally bankrupt national American political media, all, for different reasons and with varying accuracy, feel themselves threatened by Trump.

Between them, they produced the monstrous canard that he was a Russian intelligence asset, McCarthyism squared, and investigated him. They impeached him for asking the president of Ukraine to find out if the Biden family had committed improprieties in his country, which the world now knows was an appropriate concern, and it ignored as “peaceful protests” a summer of riots and arson that killed scores of people and did $2 billion of property damage in 2020 as “Trump’s America.”

Voting rules were changed in a number of states in 2020, supposedly in response to the pandemic, there was greatly expanded use of drop boxes, and the judiciary refused to hear any of the constitutional challenges Mr. Trump launched, albeit tardily, against these measures. Then, they impeached him again to remove him from office near the expiry of his term on the fatuous charge of fomenting an “insurrection,” which was the last thing he wanted.

In President Biden, they managed, between them all, to elevate the most incompetent administration in American history. They were like excited pee wee hockey players throwing their sticks in the air when they thought they had seen Mr. Trump off, but the primaries reveal that he has a lock on the Republican Party and the polls show that he is the most favored candidate for the next presidential election.

The intrusion at his home on Monday was an unspeakable tainting operation. All presidents have disputes with the federal government about ownership of some of their papers; these are matters for civil litigation and if necessary, subpoenas.

An invasion of armed FBI agents and an occupation of his Florida home for over nine hours as they ordered open the door to his document room, which he had locked at their request, and rummaged through his wife’s dresses and underwear (not on her person at least), is rightly seen by all but the most psychotic Trump-haters as an outrage.

The awkward official silences, contradictory leaks, and mealy-mouthed official explanations in subsequent days have been disgusting. The most authoritative voice of Trump-hate, the New York Times, has disclosed that Mr. Biden told his inner circle that he wants President Trump prosecuted, and that he wants Attorney General Garland to pursue the former president.

I was one of those who wrote (in the Sherbrooke Record), during the Watergate affair 50 years ago that criminalizing such nonsense to tear down a president, more than a century after the only previous presidential impeachment (Andrew Johnson), would leave the American political parties resistless against the temptation to criminalize policy differences.

This was what happened in the spurious impeachments of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. This latest desperate lunge to try to prevent Mr. Trump from returning to the White House, if it is not discontinued now, will be such a disaster, it will disgrace the Democrats for 20 years.

Whatever anyone thinks of Mr. Trump, compared to his enemies, he is a candidate for Mount Rushmore, (if those enemies do not, as some have threatened to do, blow up that monument because it bears the likenesses of four white presidents).

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From the National Post