Back in 2018 when Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen implicated the then-president in a felony plea deal, New York’s Eric Levitz half-joked that Trump’s reelection bid in 2020 was “shaping up to be a campaign to stay out of prison.” That became a much more common thought as Trump headed into a comeback bid for 2024 while facing multiple federal and state felony prosecutions. At first, political observers were surprised that all his legal problems seemed to be helping Trump win his third straight presidential nomination. It also raised eyebrows that instead of trying to get Americans to forget his horrendous behavior between Election Night in 2020 and the assault on the Capitol by his supporters on January 6, Trump embraced his outlaw status as a badge of honor and made the attempted insurrection the emotional centerpiece of his 2024 campaign.
The 45th president’s ability to weaponize his own misconduct has very much been dependent on convincing Republican opinion leaders that all his problems with the legal system were attributable to partisan persecution by Democrats. And his success on that front is best illustrated by the increasingly ubiquitous term his supporters are using for any and all efforts to hold him accountable: “lawfare.”
Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger celebrated the term recently as an apt description of what was happening to poor Trump:
The newest buzzword in our politics is lawfare, or using the legal system as a weapon against a political opponent. It sits before us now as a spectacle of political gluttony. How many lawsuits, court motions and judgments against Donald Trump can the Democratic Party chow down? More disturbing is the high price the American system may pay for this excess.
In a neat funhouse-mirror inversion of the disrespect for the law Trump’s reckless behavior indicates, Henninger claimed it was those who dared prosecute him that were dragging the legal system into the muck and mire:
The argument on behalf of this really quite unprecedented legal offensive boils down to one idea: No one is above the law. True. That view is sometimes known as ensuring respect for the law. My single-sentence reply is that the Democrats’ use of lawfare on this scale makes it likely that respect for the law will decline, and dangerously so, among much of the American public.
If Democrats had limited their legal offensive to Mr. Smith’s two federal initiatives, conservatives would have absorbed it as politics as usual, however degraded that benchmark. But the American left never knows when to stop, so it is waging the get-Trump legal assault on every imaginable front.
So it’s not Trump’s conduct we should be questioning, but the decision of prosecutors — lumped together as “the American left” — to pursue cases against him that is at fault. Continuing the theme, Trump’s own legal team is now spinning his inability to secure a $464 million bond to hold off a civil judgment involving massive business fraud, which one might normally consider a reflection of the weakness of his case and his reputation for not paying his bills, as instead the product of a reign of terror in the Empire State, as the former president’s frequent apologist Jonathan Turley told Fox News:
[T]he result is that most of us looking at this from the outside, see…a legal system that is really disassembling, that is devolving. People look at New York now as a place where you really don’t want to do business. You want to get pulled into this vortex, where politics plays such a major role in how you are treated.
The niftiest thing about the “lawfare” argument is that it can obliterate any willingness to look at the cases involving Trump in terms of their merits. Hush-money payments, defamation about a sexual assault, shady business practices, trying to overturn an election … no matter what the former president might have done, it’s all washed away by the malice of his enemies. The Washington Examiner’s veteran reporter Byron York, once a sober analyst of political developments, exemplifies the sweeping immunity afforded Trump by Republicans under the rubric of fighting “lawfare”:
So far, the “lawfare” directed at Trump — two federal indictments from a special counsel appointed by the Biden Justice Department, plus two local indictments from elected Democratic prosecutors, plus a financial lawsuit from another elected Democratic prosecutor and a sex-and-defamation lawsuit financed by a Democratic megadonor — has backfired at the polls. It helped boost Trump to a runaway victory in the Republican primaries, and so far, it hasn’t hurt him in general election matchup polls against Biden.
York professes to be shocked by the joke Biden told at a recent Gridiron Society dinner about someone deeply in debt who applied to the president for relief: “Sorry, Donald, I can’t help you.”
With one joke, Biden acknowledged the work his party’s lawfare warriors have done in the Trump matter. And how could Biden not be grateful? He’s trailing Trump in the polls, is facing an electorate that largely believes he is too old for a second term, and is underwater in approval ratings for his handling of most issues.
Is there any doubt that if Trump does win in November — or via a more successful reprisal of his 2020 post-election “stop the steal” skullduggery — his conservative enablers will want him to get a completely clean bill of health no matter what he actually did to E. Jean Carroll, to credulous 2016 voters, to the State of New York, to Mike Pence, or to public confidence in elections, among other objects of his displeasure. His reelection campaign has indeed shown that the best defense when you’re in trouble is to go on the offensive early and often, and make it all a game of winner takes all.
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