[WSJ] The Stunning Reversal of Trump’s Legal Fortunes

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The Stunning Reversal of Trump’s Legal Fortunes
How 91 counts that seemed poised to end his campaign instead made it stronger than ever

https://www.wsj.com/politics/electi...fk8gp97z77f&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

excerpt:

A year ago, the legal system seemed to be closing in on Donald Trump.

Prosecutors painted a sweeping portrait of a president who allegedly tried to overturn the results of an election he knew he lost, hung on to classified documents he knew he should return and secretly paid off a p*rn star to keep quiet about an affair he knew voters would care about. No one in America, prosecutors said, not even a former president, is above the law.

Instead, the four different cases against him have both boosted his third bid for the White House—and paved the way for him to enjoy an unprecedented level of authority if he gets there.

While a Manhattan jury in May found Trump guilty on 34 counts in the hush-money case, jailtime seems unlikely. His other cases have been delayed and likely curtailed in court. Instead of turning off voters with their detailed descriptions of misconduct, the prosecutions rallied supporters to his side.

The Supreme Court’s decision this week to effectively shield Trump from prosecution for many acts he took as president has cast into sharper focus a question that has haunted criminal investigations of the former president from the start: If the point of prosecution is to hold someone accountable for wrongdoing and punish them within the judicial system, what happens if that prosecution ends up being a political gift?

“Swimming in these waters comes with a price,” said Gregg Sofer, a longtime former federal prosecutor who was the U.S. attorney in San Antonio during the Trump administration, adding that the disparate local and federal cases had the effect of looking like a pile-on. “You do see some erosion of the credibility of the Department of Justice with the half of the population that disagrees with you.”

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Appeared in the July 6, 2024, print edition as 'Trump Prosecutions Have Been Political Gift'.
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Donald Trump and the Clouseau Democrats
An elite that can be so readily and repeatedly outsmarted is an elite that needs replacing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald...8qu4k6kzuu3&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

excerpt:

Once again, everything is coming up roses for presidential candidate Donald Trump. It usually has for a candidate whose stock in trade is contempt for the existing political class, which the political class needlessly keeps going out of its way to justify.

We’ll get to the obvious latest example, but let’s marvel at what we’ve witnessed over the past eight years.

Hillary Clinton exuded unnecessary contempt for Mr. Trump’s voters, 77,000 of whom supplied her margin of defeat in the 2016 Electoral College. James Comey and his confreres at the FBI knew Mr. Trump couldn’t be president. They bent their own rules and procedures to clear Mrs. Clinton’s path through the email minefield and likely bumblingly assured Mr. Trump’s election.

The most colossal miscalculation, though, was Democrats doubling down on Russia collusion to explain away their defeat, prompting a slow, three-year unraveling of a hoax that showed Democrats fabricating evidence and the FBI trafficking in it.

Mr. Trump, a walking machine for giving offense to large segments of the electorate, could fairly claim he withstood the most scurrilous conspiracy against an incoming president since Lincoln. The collusion hoax joined the list of things the mainstream press has to lie about in the hearing of the ever-swelling ranks of Americans who decide Mr. Trump can’t be all bad if these are his enemies.

The 2020 election would be a close call for the Clouseau Democrats—44,000 votes in three states would have changed the outcome despite a giant assist to Democrats from Covid. But finally smooth sailing beckoned. Mr. Trump added to his own terminal baggage with his “stop the steal” hoax, fatally embellishing his reasonable gripes about the 2020 election with claims of massive voter fraud for which no evidence existed.

Yet the seemingly safe assumption that Mr. Trump was now finished would fail to reckon with his enemies’ capacity for self harm. First they resurrected him among GOP voters with overtly partisan indictments in Democratic jurisdictions. Then they renominated Joe Biden even as a majority of his own voters complained he was too old, amid a failing effort of his aides to conceal the extent of his decline.

Even this understates the degree of malpractice. Mr. Biden apparently wants to make his party fight, perhaps all the way through Election Day, over how bad his condition is. Is he senile or not? Is he up to the job or not? And that’s just week one. In weeks two, three and four come the intraparty recriminations about who kept Joe’s condition from whom, whether his family is too attached to the perks of office, who should get the shiv if Mr. Trump wins in November.

The Trumpians, who would have been counted out little more than two years ago, discover now they only have to shut up while Democrats manufacture round-the-clock free TV ads for the Trump campaign, arguing over whether their own candidate is fit for office.
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