I spent most of the day Monday trying to think of a fresh take on the news last week that the Biden Justice Department, personified by a partisan hack special prosecutor named Jack Smith, had secured a 37-count indictment of Donald Trump for, the accusations go, mishandling classified documents.
But the thing is, I don’t have anything novel to offer here. And it’s not that I lack imagination or understanding — it’s that this whole thing really isn’t all that artful or complicated.
There are three elements here that everyone knows already — including those leftists in America who gleefully danced the weekend away in a joyful frenzy over what they think will finally be the destruction of the man they’ve fixated their hatred on since 2015.
What are they? Well…
Jack Smith is hilarious.
Smith, on announcing the Trump indictment, put out one of the more obnoxiously fraudulent quotes in American political history.
“We have one set of laws in this country,” said Smith. “They apply to everyone.”
But no one believes this.
They don’t believe it because they remember when Scooter Libby was prosecuted and Sandy Berger was not, when Steve Bannon was brought up for contempt of Congress but Eric Holder was not, and when Roger Stone was subjected to an early-morning SWAT raid but Marc Elias slept safely and soundly.
And they don’t believe it when Trump is indicted for keeping documents he had plenary power to declassify and hold, under the terms of a law that makes the president the arbiter of what is covered. (READ MORE: The Second Trump Indictment Spells Trouble)
This indictment isn’t quite an example of the “process crime” trap, but it’s certainly trending that way. Six of the 37 counts are based on Trump’s refusal to turn over documents that the National Archives hectored him about — in other words, boiled down, he’s being accused of daring to disagree with the Deep State, which had demonstrated time and again that it was out to get him.
When Hillary Clinton operated on a private email server to supervise our nation’s foreign policy so that she could shield herself from public scrutiny while running an influence-peddling racket disguised as U.S. foreign affairs. Everyone knows this, and yet, according to the ridiculous James Comey, “no reasonable prosecutor” would ever charge her with it.
And meanwhile, the current president was found to have kept oodles of classified documents he collected while both a senator and vice president; neither position afforded him the power to declassify anything.
But Jack Smith says we have only one set of laws.
What a farcical, sadly comic statement that is.
Our government is weaponized against us.
What’s true, regardless of the screeching of people like Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney, is that the Trump indictments sent a signal most Americans already had received loud and clear — namely, that there is no protection from an out-of-control federal government. For anyone who isn’t part of the regime.
Of course, the panoply of crooked actors allied with the Democrat/Deep State Machine are above the law. We already knew that.
But outside of the machine, there is no wealth, no power, and no status that protects anyone from having his life destroyed by the Justice Department.
Yes, Trump’s indictment appears to be a terrible insult and a poorly told joke laying waste to what used to be a justice system we were proud of. But it’s also a message.
We can get a former president, the message goes. Just think what we can do to you.
While we’re considering that the Justice Department is openly meddling in a presidential election by prosecuting a former and perhaps future president over his storage of documents in locked rooms at a private club, what’s happening to Trump is really a sideshow.
More than 1,000 Americans are now held as political prisoners for having petitioned the government for a redress of grievances on Jan. 6. Sure, some of them misbehaved at the U.S. Capitol, doing more than trespassing. But we already know that the vast majority of them did nothing more than left-wing protesters have been doing in that building on a routine basis for years. And yet they’re still being rounded up years later.
Then there’s Mark Houck. There are the “terrorist” parents at school board meetings. And on, and on.
The Trump indictment is just a reminder of this weaponization. It’s gone on for years, it takes many forms, and it becomes more obnoxious and forceful practically every day.
Trump said they weren’t out to get him, they were out to get you and he’s just in the way. He looks more and more spot-on with that statement every day.
And they know it, and they don’t care. Which might be the scariest bit of all.
David Catron was right; this is a pump-and-dump operation in which our elections are being rigged.
A few weeks back, my estimable colleague here at The American Spectator David Catron wrote a piece that was immediately recognizable as true. He suggested that what’s been going on with the Democrat Party and media and their nonstop, paranoid fixation on Trump wasn’t just a form of mental illness writ large but instead a strategic long game designed to break the Republican Party and usher in a one-party era of political dominance.
You can decide whether it’s working.
Catron said all of this attention is the old “pump and dump” stock swindle applied to a political context. It’s built on the idea that through endless media coverage Trump would become the only choice for Republican voters — the pump — while at the same time he’d be so toxic among the electorate at large that he couldn’t win the general election.
That last part being the dump.
You know this is true just as I do. That doesn’t mean it’ll work. It didn’t work in 2016, when Trump bested a vast and highly qualified GOP candidate field mostly because none of them could command media attention like he could.
Was some of that his celebrity persona? No doubt about it. Trump has more charisma than Ted Cruz, and he has more cultural and political credibility than, say, Marco Rubio or Scott Walker. He might well have been the nominee even without the spotlight being put on him 24/7 throughout the GOP primaries. And it didn’t hurt that Trump emerged as the head of a populist movement within the Republican Party that long predated him but had been without a real leader since Ronald Reagan left the political stage.
But someone else could helm that movement. A credible, though perhaps inconclusive, argument could be made that the movement might profit from different leadership.
Regardless of all that, it’s very clear that everything in American politics is now calibrated to keep Donald Trump front and center of every news cycle. Lawsuits, indictments, never-ending focus on Jan. 6, you name it and it’s ubiquitous. You are not allowed to forget about Trump, whether you want to or not.
And he’s endlessly demonized in ways it’s clear will only harden his support among core Republican voters while alienating everyone else.
Again, this might very well fail. But it’s very difficult to deny that it’s happening.
Think about the news stories bumped from the top of the fold because of the Trump indictment. Ukraine’s “counteroffensive” in the war with Russia, the never-ending Biden crime family revelations … none of those are garnering any real attention now because of some stupid dispute between a former president and bureaucrats from the National Archives.
They’ve gotten so good at the pump-and-dump that they’re doing both at the same time.
Defeating the pump-and-dump either requires a different GOP candidate, something that right now doesn’t look very likely, or a much more touchy-feely Trump who elicits sympathy from the soft voters who turned against him in 2020.
As Democrats can’t run on their negative record of accomplishment, and as the media literally is no longer trusted to report real news, the endless pump-and-dump is all we have. It’s a trap they’ve put us in, and we’re not allowed to escape it.
And this is the most infuriating aspect of all concerning Jack Smith’s escapade in Miami.
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