By Kelly Sloan | Contributing Columnist, Rocky Mountain Voice
It is pretty much universally accepted, at least quietly and with furtive glances, that Manhattan Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump was… er… unorthodox, to say the least.
The legal gymnastics required to take a misdemeanor for which the statute of limitations has long since expired and transmogrify it into 34 felonies are almost disturbingly impressive. They are similar, in reverse, to the circumlocutions that liberal DA’s go through to reduce charges and keep real criminals out of jail. It’s nearly impossible, for instance, to get convicted of a felony and get sentenced to prison in Denver, the local appetite being more geared towards pleading down to misdemeanors whatever crimes the Colorado Legislature has not gotten around to de-felonizing yet, and to releasing everyone on personal recognizance bonds.
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal points out that in the month of May, while DA Bragg was focusing on Trump’s falsification of bookkeeping records, some 4,900 arrests were made in Manhattan North and Manhattan South, a number which “includes six arrests for murder, 12 for rape, 15 grand theft auto, 210 burglary, 214 robbery, 362 grand larceny (over $1,000), and 390 felony assault.” If nothing else, that brings up a question of priorities.
The whole episode brings up other questions too. As a conservative, I am no particular fan of Donald Trump, and find his salacious behaviour reprehensible. However, also as a conservative, I am a fan, a rather big one, of the Rule of Law, which instructs us that no one, including a President or former President, is above the law. If that ex-President breaks the law, they ought to be prosecuted for it just as any other person would.
Except Trump was not prosecuted like anyone else. If anybody else had done the things Trump had done, the case would have been quietly settled, had they been charged at all. For that matter, that would very likely be the situation for Trump as well, were he not running for President again. This was only tangentially, at best, about the law – it was political, pure and simple.
So what now? Well, it would seem there are very good reasons to assume that at least parts of the case, if not the whole thing, will be overturned on the expected appeal. Others have done the legal analysis, but the short version is that the only way Bragg could mold the expired bookkeeping misdemeanor into a felony was to link it to the commission of a second offense; in this instance an extraordinarily tenuous association to campaign finance laws. There is also Judge Juan Merchan’s – unusual – instructions to the jury that they needn’t be unanimously in accord over which campaign finance violation Trump was supposed to be breaking – meaning we don’t even know exactly what he is guilty of.
Since this was largely a political act, the more pertinent questions are, of course, political. The obvious first one is how this will play out in the coming election. It is impossible to predict. On the one hand, right or wrong, however it came about, Trump is now a convicted felon, and conventional wisdom would suggest that will not sit well with voters. On the other hand, those voters may be more uneasy with the overtly political nature of the conviction that the conviction itself, and register that disapproval at the ballot box. It has almost certainly further entrenched die-hard Trump supporters, and his campaign raked in millions of dollars in the days following the verdict. Trump’s sentencing is set for July 11 – four days before the Republican National Convention – and whatever the sentence, Trump will undoubtedly milk it for all its worth.
But there are other, larger, more profound questions that arise from this conviction beyond the merely short-term political ones. One is how this will impact the American public’s already shaky trust in the legal system. The use of the justice system for political purposes is distasteful to most Americans regardless of party; and even if one is predisposed against Trump, or believes that what he did merited the conviction, it will be increasingly difficult for people to watch violent crimes get pled down while crime rates go up, juxtaposed against the unusually aggressive prosecution of Trump, and not begin to wonder if something is out of whack.
Finally, of course, this portends the onset of widespread use of what has become known colloquially as “lawfare” in politics. That Pandora’s Box may prove exceedingly difficult to close, and there is no telling just yet where exactly that will take the country. In the meantime, the polls inform us, we have a sitting President running for reelection who is so bad that he is losing to a convicted felon. May God have mercy on us.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.