The Democrats have crossed the Rubicon by convicting Donald Trump, and America’s cultural cold war has turned hot. It’s time to get engaged in the fight.

“Lawfare” consists of weaponizing the legal system (civil and criminal) against one’s political opponents. Unlike actual warfare, which is openly hellish, lawfare is typically—and falsely—conducted in the name of “justice,” but hellishly undermines both the truth and the rule of law. Even if the charges fail, the victim often faces financial and reputational ruin. The Kafkaesque process is the punishment.

Color Me Naive. As cynical as I thought I was
about the state of America’s legal system, I fervently held out hope that even a single juror might vote to acquit President Trump in the circus-like show trial conducted by Judge Juan Merchan in Manhattan, thereby producing a hung jury and mistrial. In my defense, Chronicles’ estimable legal affairs editor, Stephen B. Presser, displayed the same naïveté in his pre-verdict prognostications (see “A Prayer for the Defeat of Lawfare” in the June/July 2024 Chronicles). Alas, our hopes were dashed on May 30, when the 12 New York City jurors returned a unanimous guilty verdict on all 34 felony counts, after only nine hours of deliberation, making Trump the first former president ever to be convicted of a crime.

My reaction to this unprecedented verdict was twofold. Like many Americans, I was shocked that a transparently politically motivated prosecution targeting the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee in the middle of a presidential campaign—an obvious act of partisan lawfare—could succeed in a nation said to exalt the rule of law. The imposition of an unconstitutional gag order against a presidential candidate during the campaign, as Judge Merchan did, was a tyrannical judge’s dream come true. My dismay was heightened by a sense of betrayal as I realized that my hope for a hung jury had been based on my Boomer nostalgia for a more decent and honorable country—one that in 2024 no longer exists, at least in the Big Apple. 

The verdict shook my faith in the rule of law. The Rubicon has been crossed; the United States is no longer a country I recognize. This was an ominous revelation. If a billionaire former president, the best-known man in the world, can be railroaded in a rigged kangaroo court, any of us could be. I suspect many Americans share my shock and outrage, as well they should. This “hush money” verdict—in a case involving, at best, a recordkeeping misdemeanor, transformed by the Soros-funded Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg into a bogus felony—should serve as a wake-up call to all freedom-loving Americans. The gulag beckons.

It was not always this way. I recall President Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon the disgraced former President Richard Nixon in 1974, knowing it would likely doom his prospects for election in 1976, in order to help the nation heal. Ford realized that the spectacle of trying a former president would irreparably damage our shared norms. Ford sought to abate the “ugly passions” and bitter polarization that had been aroused by Watergate. Ford’s magnanimity was reminiscent of the sentiments invoked in President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, at the close of the horrific Civil War, when he spoke of the need to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” encouraging Americans to act “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” We have come a long way since 1865.

Despite my naïveté and nostalgia, I am no Pollyanna about the American legal system. I practiced law for 30 years in the People’s Republic of California, defending clients from scores of frivolous lawsuits brought by unscrupulous lawyers. My personal blog is titled Misrule of Law. In the course of decades as a legal writer, I frequently railed against judicial activism, the plundering and sometimes destruction of entire industries by the plaintiff’s bar, the left’s capture of legal academia and the organized bar (and even the once-conservative legal profession), and, recently, the persecution of President Trump’s lawyers (such as John Eastman) and allies (such as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton). I saw all the signs. How could I have failed, so embarrassingly, to connect the dots?

The destruction of national norms, as Ernest Hemingway suggested about the onset of bankruptcy, occurs “gradually and then suddenly.” I had taken notice of the gradual, incremental steps, but got caught flat-footed by the synergistic coup de grâce. How did this happen, what does it mean, and what is the solution? 

The last time Democrats tried to steal a presidential election through legal maneuvering was in 2000 during Vice President Al Gore’s dead-heat electoral contest against George W. Bush, when they attempted to drag Gore across the finish line by hijacking the recount process in Florida. Gore’s legal team nearly succeeded. Democrat election lawyers such as Marc Elias have become much more sophisticated—and effective—since the days of arguing over “hanging chads” on computer punch cards. 

I consider the 2000 election dispute in Florida a dress rehearsal for more far-reaching schemes. In 2020, the multistate, pandemic-enabled legal skullduggery engineered by Elias’s platoon of activist lawyers (and $400 million in “Zuck Bucks” provided by Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg) allowed the Democrats to rig the election in favor of Joe Biden, a feeble, unimpressive candidate who campaigned from his basement. 

In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court had to issue its fateful Bush v. Gore decision to wrest control of the presidential election from the heavy-handed pro-Gore apparatchiks on the Florida Supreme Court. A quarter-century after Gore’s defeat, all the ingredients that led to that showdown still exist on an even greater scale: a cadre of ruthless, power-hungry lawyers willing to cheat and lie to win; the politics of personal destruction and the Big Lie have become standard campaign tactics; gaslighting, propaganda, and misdirection by the “chattering classes” in the media, academia, Hollywood, Big Tech, and other elite institutions now controlled by the left; and a nihilistic, postmodern legal culture in which any means are justified in order to reach the desired ends.

The astonishing willingness of 51 former senior intelligence officials to lie about the provenance of Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop, claiming it was “Russian disinformation”—and brazen attempts to suppress it prior to the 2020 election—exemplify the lack of scruples that now characterizes our politics. This didn’t happen overnight.

Several new factors have emerged since 2000, contributing to our current plight.

First, Democrat Party politics have shifted far to the left, as generations molded by social media and indoctrinated by woke propaganda in K-12 and college have come of age and now inhabit urban centers and coastal enclaves. The summer of 2020, marked by the explosion of Black Lives Matter rioting following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, revealed how volatile and unhinged this demographic has become. Urban dwellers vote overwhelmingly progressive. America in 2024 is now a sharply divided nation: two separate countries—red and blue—uneasily sharing common national borders. As conservative voters increasingly flee mismanaged blue states, the partisan chasm only grows wider and the political silos become more entrenched.

People living in cities such as New York, D.C., and Atlanta, and in states like California, hold the values of heartland residents in utter contempt. In these blue strongholds, prosecutors such as Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg and New York’s Letitia James were elected because of their explicit and unethical campaign promises to “get” Donald Trump. With overwhelmingly leftist electorates and correspondingly leftist judges and prosecutors, blue cities are inhospitable venues for conservatives who are sued or charged with crimes. The voters also serve as jurors, after all. This is why most of the lawfare against Republicans is conducted in a handful of blue jurisdictions that resemble banana republics. Indeed, in many cities, the legal climate is as hostile to conservatives as the Jim Crow South was to civil rights activists.

Second, beginning with the lawless tenure of Attorney General Eric Holder in the Obama administration, Democrats have discovered they can get away with maintaining a two-tier system of justice that rewards friends of the regime and punishes its enemies. Thus, the Jan. 6 protestors are subjected to relentless manhunts and maximal punishment while BLM and Antifa rioters are treated with kid gloves. Peaceful abortion protesters are arrested and prosecuted, and the FBI investigates as domestic terrorists traditionalist Catholics attending Latin Mass and parents speaking at school board meetings.

In contrast, pro-Hamas demonstrators are allowed to block highways and disrupt college campuses with impunity, and unruly mobs are permitted to intimidate Supreme Court justices at their homes in violation of the law. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro are sentenced to prison for contempt of Congress, while Eric Holder, Lois Lerner, and Merrick Garland defied Congress without consequence. Hillary Clinton gets a pass for campaign finance violations and the mishandling of classified documents while others are prosecuted for less. Et cetera, ad nauseam.

This differential treatment erodes the rule of law—the bedrock principle that laws must be evenhandedly enforced. The entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court building bears the words “Equal Justice Under Law.” Democrats routinely make a mockery of this phrase. With so many laws on the books, most of them extremely vague, an aggressive prosecutor can convince a grand jury (so the expression goes) “to indict a ham sandwich.” Each time our legal norms are distorted in this fashion, the public’s respect for the law is diminished, and the left’s insatiable appetite for power is whetted and emboldened. Unless this is corrected, our republic is in peril.

Third, the left has developed a fanatical hatred for Donald Trump so pronounced that the phenomenon is widely termed Trump Derangement Syndrome (a phrase coined by the late Chronicles columnist Justin Raimondo). The hatred of leftists (and RINOs) is provoked not so much by Trump’s personality and temperament as by his blunt embrace of America First policies, such as closing the border, insisting on fair trade, not blindly supporting overseas wars, and appointing true constitutional conservatives to the federal courts. More importantly, Trump takes these issues seriously and is willing to fight for them. Liberals seethe at the conservative majority Trump installed on the Supreme Court and its resulting 2022 Dobbs decision that overruled Roe v. Wade. The deep state despises him because he vows to drain the swamp—and means it. Trump caters to ordinary Americans whom the left condemns as a “basket of deplorables,” “irredeemables,” “semi-fascists,” and losers who “bitterly cling to their guns and religion.”

Liberals detest Trump because they loathe the voters he represents. This explains the intensity of the uniparty establishment’s efforts to defeat or neutralize Trump—as candidate and president: the fabricated Steele dossier, phony FISA warrants to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, the spurious Russian collusion hoax, two bogus impeachments, the entrapment and persecution of General Michael Flynn, the baseless investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller (conducted with the assistance of Javert-like zealots such as Andrew Weissmann), and the farcical spectacle of the House of Representatives’ January 6 Committee, vice-chaired by the Trump-hating Liz Cheney, a so-called Republican unceremoniously dumped by her Wyoming constituents in a landslide.

Unable to drive Trump from office, in 2020 the Democrats managed sufficiently to tilt the playing field in battleground states for Joe Biden to win. But when Trump refused to acquiesce in the rigged election, and in fact challenged the Democrats’ hijinks and announced he would run again in 2024, the left tried to destroy him with a gauntlet of lawfare without precedent in America: Two “defamation” lawsuits filed in New York by advice columnist E. Jean Carroll regarding an alleged sexual assault that she claims occurred in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996 under circumstances suspiciously similar to a 2012 Law & Order episode; an absurd civil fraud case filed by Letitia James based on alleged misrepresentations made by Trump’s company to obtain real estate loans, even though all the loans were repaid and no bank complained of fraud; an election-related RICO case under Georgia law brought in Fulton County by Fani Willis; two federal prosecutions by Special Counsel Jack Smith alleging a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling of presidential records; and the outlandish “hush money” case—relating to an alleged encounter in 2006, and based on the testimony of a convicted perjurer—before an unethical, Democrat-donating judge that resulted in a conviction on May 30.

This summary does not include a barrage of vindictive proceedings (criminal charges and disbarment) against Trump’s aides and lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, and frivolous attempts to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024 based on his purported status as an “insurrectionist.” This onslaught of retaliatory litigation is without parallel in U.S. history. The Democrats thought they could overwhelm Trump, make him radioactive, and keep him from running for reelection. They obviously miscalculated. So far, the voters have not abandoned Trump as “damaged goods,” and in fact the multistate lawfare tactics appear to have backfired—eliciting sympathy and support for Trump. After the verdict, Trump raised a record amount of campaign contributions. His rallies are packed. 

Voters see the politically motivated lawfare as election interference, which some believe is orchestrated by a poll-challenged Biden. As The Wall Street Journal reported after the verdict: 

Thursday’s jury verdict could also prove to be the last straw for many Americans who believe that Trump has been targeted for prosecution to stop his presidential campaign and his ‘Make America Great Again’ movement, setting a dangerous precedent of using the criminal-justice system for political ends. That could reanimate the voters that swept him into office in 2016.

Trump’s opponents are desperate to stop him because they do not want to relinquish the power they have corruptly accumulated for decades under uniparty rule in Washington, D.C. Trump stands in their way, so they are trying to destroy him. Gleeful Democrats want to see Trump behind bars. If they succeed, Trump’s supporters will be helpless prey. 

Unless they are stopped, Democrats may resort to similar measures against ordinary citizens who are perceived as noncompliant “dissidents.” We must never let this happen in America.

Trump’s legal team will appeal all the unfavorable rulings, which are riddled with glaring flaws. At the risk of repeating my display of naïveté,I am hopeful that the appellate courts in New York and Georgia, the federal appellate courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually rectify the numerous, egregious errors committed by the partisan prosecutors and judges. The Supreme Court has already thrown out Colorado’s attempt to exclude Trump from the ballot, and reversed lower courts’ denial of presidential immunity to Trump for his official acts. And more appeals are possible. The tide is turning.

Despite being relentlessly pummeled, President Trump is not beaten. He resolutely fights on, and so must we. We cannot allow ourselves to “go wobbly,” in the words of the Iron Lady. Don’t despair: fight back. The only verdict that matters will be rendered on Nov. 5. What Americans need to understand about Trump’s fake “ham sandwich” conviction is that it means the “cold” civil war brewing since at least 2016 has turned hot. Hostilities have commenced.

The New York verdict was both a travesty of justice and a clarion call to action. Patriots must respond with alacrity. It was not a Pearl Harbor moment, since the enemies have been operating in plain sight, not by stealth. Rather, it is akin to the “shot heard ’round the world” at Concord. It is time for patriotic Americans to reclaim their country, and restore the rule of law. 

Republican elected officials must not only enter the fray, they must abandon the gentlemanly Marquess of Queensberry rules they typically use (if they fight at all), and recognize that we are in a vicious cage match. The other side is ruthless and flouts the rules. To prevail, we must reciprocate. The survival of our democratic institutions is at stake. 

When, decades ago, I wrote about the Democrats’ attempt to steal the presidential election in 2000, I ended with these words: “The public must remember what it feels like to engage in combat with a remorseless enemy, because the fight has just begun.” Sadly, the enemy has become more formidable in the intervening 24 years. This is the most important election in your lifetime. Get engaged, now. Make the rule of law great again.