Had the American people not rallied around President Trump as odious phony prosecutions engulfed him during his presidential campaign, he may not have been re-elected president and instead endured a terrible fate.
In South America this week, we are seeing how bad it could have been.
Late yesterday, Brazil's manic, freakish, version of Judge James Boasberg, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, ordered Brazil's equivalent of President Trump, former President Jair Bolsonaro arrested for questioning the 2022 Brazilian presidential electoral result, that, as with President Trump, he was mysteriously defeated in by a narrow margin after showing significant strength on the campaign trail.
According to Reuters:
Moaes didn't care that a tariffs deal with the U.S. was predicated on fair treatment of Bolsonaro, which is bound to affect Brazil's economy negatively. He doesn't care about Brazil at all. He is a man possessed, like the lawfare artists in the U.S., with Bolsonaro Derangement Syndrome.
Bolsonaro had been elected by a huge majority in his first term after the excesses, corruptions, and failures of the left, a long miserable period that culminated in the green swimming pools at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. He challenged Brazil's deep state, made Brazil an economic powerhouse again, and earned the raging enmity of the left. Now, no good deed goes unpunished.
This could have been us, had President Trump not prevailed in court from a similar cabal of politically connected lawfare prosecutors, each more creative than the next at bringing a slew of ham-sandwich indictments against President Trump, all at once and all coming right after he decided to run for re-election. One wonders if Bolsonaro can ever come back from this lawfare trap from an ambitious and woke judge, raising questions as to whether change is ever possible in Brazil or the Brazilian people will find a way to rise up. President Trump's support for Bolsonaro has got to be a helpful line out to that deep-state choked country. But the outcome is unknown, the only sure thing is the malevolence of Bolsonaro's enemies.
It's not the only place where lawfare lunacy reigns -- last week, the nightmare was in Colombia, where former President Alvaro Uribe was convicted of a ginned-up bribery charge and sentenced to 12 years of house arrest.
According to the New York Times:
Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s conservative former president who shaped the country’s politics more than anyone over the past 25 years, was found guilty on Monday of bribery in criminal proceedings and procedural fraud. It was the first major criminal conviction of a former Colombian leader.
Mr. Uribe was accused of working with a lawyer in an unsuccessful effort to bribe a former paramilitary to retract testimony that damaged him. The paramilitary had said that Mr. Uribe, 73, founded and financed a paramilitary group in the 1990s, during the country’s long and bloody internal conflict.
The ruling, by Judge Sandra Heredia of a lower circuit court in Bogotá, is likely to further divide the nation, which has long debated the legacy of Mr. Uribe’s role in the conflict. As president from 2002 to 2010 he pursued an aggressive military campaign against the country’s leftist rebel groups, significantly weakening the largest group and bringing a measure of security the nation had not seen in years.
Uribe, recall, transformed his country from a guerrilla-infested Marxist cocaine hellhole into one of Latin America's safest, cleanest and fastest growing countries. Incomes rose. Crime fell. Illegal immigration to the U.S. dropped almost to zero in those Uribe years, and Colombia ended up with an illegal alien problem of its own from Venezuela, a nation that its nationals historically went to legally or illegally to find work. Uribe transformed Colombia, made it a major non-NATO ally of the U.S. and OECD member, giving it a great sense of pride.
Oh, and there were the rescues, the spectacular hostage rescues and guerrilla rubouts that exposed the evils of Hugo Chavez's Venezuelan regime and freed hostages, including three Americans who been held for years in monstrous jungle conditions. Colombia's army became a serious army under Uribe.
The sudden concern with 'bribery' as they called it, was pure kangaroo court stuff in light of the Odebrecht scandal and other scandals. That it happened against Uribe was pure lawfare, and ironic, because Colombia is a nation that prides itself on its legal tradition -- which unfortunately has gotten too big for its britches since the election of radical leftwing President Gustavo Petro, who, like Brazil's President Luiz Inacio 'Lula' da Silva's closest associates, is a former leftwing guerrilla.
Uribe's case is very sad and must be cause to him for ruefulness. He has always been an implacable foe of the left, once stating to, I think it was Mary O'Grady at the Wall Street Journal, that he didn't believe in the political pendulum theory -- he wanted the left crushed. He understood that it was because it wasn't democratic the way normal political tendencies are, it would always kill you if you didn't kill it first. The left was not like the right and there was no continuum.
During the early Obama years, Uribe, who was insanely popular in Colombia, was offered the choice to end term limits and run for a third term, which, during the time when Colombia was seeking free trade with the U.S., Uribe, with great hesitation, went along with.
To zero surprise for him, the left acted exactly the way he thought they would, coming after him the way he went after their heroes, stated or not, the leftist FARC guerrillas, and they never forgave him.
Uribe remained immensely popular yet his conservative successors have been weak, the last one losing out to the odious Petro, a drug addict, former terrorist whose M-19 guerrilla group literally burned down Colombia's Supreme Court with many of the justices in it in the 1980s, and gushy friend of Hugo Chavez.
Uribe, too, was very Trump-like in his days, a proto-Trump, actually, with the slightly gruff focus and amiability of Ronald Reagan. Of course they came to get him, giggling judges, dancing guerrillas, all they needed were a few flames to dance around in to make the picture perfect.
The attack on Uribe and the attack on Bolsonaro are typical nonsense seen in Latin America which often chases its ex-presidents out of th country. But it also was clearly an ugly outgrowth of the lawfare attacks on Trump. Monkey see, monkey do.
It shows how bad it could have been for President Trump and what a bullet we dodged on the day he got elected. I won't cross my fingers, but let's hope South America has a similar outcome.
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