Alvin Bragg's Show Trial of Donald Trump Is an Attack on the Rule of Law | Opinion

The "criminal" trial of former president Donald J. Trump is underway, and there is much speculation about the merits of the case. We can dispense with that up front: the merits are practically nonexistent.

Partisan prosecutor Alvin Bragg, more showman than lawman, alleges that a 2016 transaction from the Trump Organization was deceptively categorized in its accounting. Even if that dubious claim were true, it is only a misdemeanor offense whose statute of limitations ran out long ago. So how is it that a felony trial is underway for an act that isn't a felony, and is well outside the statute of limitations?

As millions of Americans across the nation—and the political spectrum—suspect, this entire misadventure is nothing more than a charade. Desperate to do something, anything, to shift the focus from President Joe Biden's failures, Bragg has resorted to prosecuting Trump just months before the election. He knows he is unlikely to win a conviction, but this case isn't about justice; it's about distraction. That is how we get to where we are now. That is how we have a criminal show trial of a former—and likely future—president of the United States, right at the opening of the general-election season.

Sometimes things are exactly as they appear, and in those cases, we have a responsibility to state the obvious. So let us acknowledge what is happening here: this prosecution is an act of lawfare, the deliberate perversion of the law and its processes to target, isolate, and persecute a specific individual—and not at all coincidentally, disenfranchise the tens of millions of Americans who could make him president again.

One might argue that Bragg is exceedingly scrupulous in his pursuit of justice. But one need only look at how he administers "justice" in nearly every other sphere of his jurisdiction to see his brazen partisanship. Although the Manhattan district attorney infamously declared that his office will not prosecute certain crimes, his two-tiered notion of justice suggests that Trump will have the book thrown at him. One might also argue that Bragg's timing is pure coincidence and unrelated to the national election cycle. But the district attorney has had the evidence for nearly eight years, and only now decided to prosecute. A false urgency and a phony conscientiousness betray the truth of the thing.

Alvin Bragg isn't the sole perpetrator here. Even as he pursues the criminal case against Trump, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who ran for office in 2018 on the promise that she would "get Trump," has pursued—successfully to date—a civil case against him. That case is equally contrived and equally political, but nevertheless deeply damaging in having secured a fine of such preposterous (and effectively unpayable) size that break with sense and precedent alike. This monstrous $455 million fine, considered by many constitutional experts as a violation of the Eighth Amendment, was ultimately stayed by the New York Appellate Division.

But—and this cannot be overstated—Bragg and James are merely instruments in a larger coordinated effort to impoverish and jail the former president. All roads lead back to the United States Department of Justice and to the Oval Office, where Biden, through Attorney General Merrick Garland and Special Counsel Jack Smith, is rushing to prosecute Trump before the 2024 presidential election. Taken in combination, we see what this is really all about: a grand scheme to keep Trump off the ballot—because Biden knows that he cannot beat him in a fair fight. Remember, each day the former president spends in court and each dollar spent on legal fees is time and money not spent campaigning.

Trump is fond of noting that the powers of the progressive regime really aren't after him—they're after the American people, and he's just in the way. But they are after him, because he was the sole chief executive in a generation to get between them and their project to rule Americans in their own fanatical autocracy. The prospect that he might return to office—older, wiser, better prepared, more aggressive, and less accommodating—instills in them an existential fear. They're right to feel it. If he returns to the White House, their power and privileges will ebb away. Among their perquisites that will disappear: the ability to attack individuals with the might and mercilessness of the law.

For all this, the greater sin of Bragg, James, and the whole progressive clique is not that they attack the former president, nor even that they attack Americans, but that they attack the law. Law in the American system is supposed to be the mechanism of justice, a surpassing good meant for nothing else. It is not a plaything of powerholders, nor an arena of gamesmanship for political advantage. To pervert it in the ways we see now is a direct attack upon the American system. In lesser democracies, where the tradition of corruption is robust and the abuse of the law is a mere expectation, the civic remedy is simply to confer prosecutorial immunity to any elected officeholder. We haven't done that in America because, for centuries, we trusted the apparatus of the law and, therefore, believed that no man was above it.

But when the law serves injustice, there is no law—and the consequences are unforeseeable. The merits of the case against President Donald J. Trump are nonexistent, but its consequences could be grave. Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and the whole cohort behind them are betting they can execute a process end-run on the American people writ large, and get away with it. It is monumental hubris, grotesque in its reach and aspiration—and it will meet the end that hubris always does.

Brooke Leslie Rollins is the President & CEO of the America First Policy Institute, and former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.