Two significant developments have just taken place in quick succession in a growing fight over whether America’s legal system is, or should be, a political weapon.

New York’s appeals court threw out an absurd $527 million fine won in 2024 against Donald Trump by New York Attorney General Letitia James for supposed financial fraud. The court didn’t nix the whole case, so the president will pursue his appeal. But it did arrive at the glaringly obvious conclusion that a fine of more than half a billion dollars for an offense in which there was no victim violated the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on excessive punishment.

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James’s dubious case was that Trump committed fraud by inflating the value of his real estate to secure sweet terms on loans. Trump argued that valuations are a matter of opinion — surely that is what a market means — and lenders who reaped millions of dollars in the deals testified that they had no grounds for complaint.

More pertinent is that James won election by telling voters she was going to nail Trump. Like other Democratic prosecutors and elected politicians in the past decade, she acted on the assumption that Trump must be attacked even though she had not yet found legitimate, let alone solid, grounds for doing so. The state had never sued in this way before, but James believed in lawfare — warfare using the legal system as a weapon.

Now that Trump is in the White House, his Justice Department is investigating James for civil rights offenses in her conduct against Trump, and for possible criminal real estate fraud. The former cannot be dismissed as simple revenge, for James’s conduct was egregiously and improperly tendentious and should be punished. Perhaps, also, it was she rather than Trump who committed financial offenses. But it is hard not to see Trump’s actions now as including a willing element of lawfare.

It’s even easier to do so after what smells like a second act of Trumpian lawfare. William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department accusing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of — you guessed it — mortgage fraud. The case looks skimpy, and the background is that Cook voted with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell against cutting interest rates, defying the president. After Pulte’s charge, Trump called on Cook to resign, which would allow him to nominate a replacement who’d vote against Powell.

Government and the legal system in a serious country aren’t supposed to work like this. Using prosecutions and other legal harassment to achieve political ends is what tyrants and banana republics do.

Former President Joe Biden wasn’t the first pol to pervert the law’s awesome power to his political advantage. But his perversion was unprecedentedly blatant and persistent. He and his minions encouraged politically active legal shysters, who didn’t need encouragement, to dog Trump through the courts and make political rivalry a punishable offense.

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This was always clearly a dreadful thing to do, not merely because it was corrupt in and of itself but because it was corrupting of government and the law in general. It was also clear that, after being subjected to such treatment, Trump and his supporters would hit back, so lawfare would multiply and spread.

We’re living with that now.