"For My Enemies...The Law"

Peruvian presidente Oscar R. Benavides famously said: “For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” The fact that the musings of a uniformed South American strongman is so applicable today is both sad and frightening, but this is where we are. I’ve read the Donald Trump indictment, which involves 34 counts of falsifying business records. But I’m not an attorney, so there very well could substance there beyond the payment of hush money to a porn star from campaign funds back in 2016, (which for anyone not named Trump would usually classified as one count of a misdemeanor). Yet, my Spidey senses tell me this is but the latest in the Democrat Party’s non-stop assault on this man beginning the moment he threw his hat into the 2016 race. The manic obsession with “getting Trump '' at all costs only accelerated when he shocked the Deep State by somehow winning first the GOP nomination then presidency, defeating a slew of preferred establishment candidates from the well-financed Jeb Bush to the matriarch of the Clinton machine herself.

Once the smoke cleared from that stunning electoral victory, the machine set in motion a relentless campaign to discredit and even oust this usurper from the Oval Office. Their office. To them, the White House was the place in which president after president, Democrat or Republican, pliantly did the bidding of the military-industrial complex that gorged at the trough of an ever more bankrupted treasury which funded their foreign wars. Meanwhile those on Capitol Hill enriched themselves at the expense of the American taxpayer through insider trading, lobbying dollars, exorbitant speaking fees, generous pensions, and perks. Not to mention the cushy corporate board seats, legal partnerships, and academic or media sinecures they often fall into upon leaving office. To call being in Congress “public service” is an oxymoron as its members enter DC as paupers but leave as princes.  

What we are most likely seeing today, courtesy of a hyper-politicized Manhattan DA who ran on a platform of “getting Trump” for something, anything, is a chilling demonstration of the power our labyrinthian legal system has handed to any prosecutor with a political agenda. And it really isn’t just about Trump. The Donald famously said: “their real target is you, not me” and as hyperbolic as that sounds, there is some truth to that. In the sense that if they want to make you a target they can.

Consider: Yale law professor Stephen Carter has observed that “70 percent of American adults have committed a crime that could lead to imprisonment.” He goes on to state that there are “300,000 or more federal regulations that may be enforceable with criminal punishment.” To go even further, Harvard University professor Harvey Silverglate estimates that daily life in the US is so over-criminalized that the average American commits roughly three felonies per day. His book of the same title makes a compelling case for what seems at first glance like an astounding claim. And yet we’re seeing these warnings come to fruition in real-time.

To be sure, Republicans are not innocent of misuse of the legal statutes for political vengeance. In fact, were we to do a retracement of this dangerous path to banana republicanism we seem hell-bent on following, the starting point could very well have been back in late1998 with the nakedly political misuse of the impeachment provision as a weapon to target the object of their own obsession, Democrat President Bill Clinton. (Ironically for the GOP, the Jacobin-like zealots in control of the Democrat Party today would most likely have ridden Bill Clinton out of their camp on a rail for being too “right wing”!) They expended their powder on a relatively benign target when compared to the radical leftists Obama and Biden who followed. So the seed of this metastasizing weed can be found not in Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s Congress, but Republican Dennis Hastert’s.

Ironically, or perhaps in a bit of karma, Hastert himself would end up being investigated, prosecuted, and convicted of illegal use of his office’s funds to pay hush money to a former high school student he sexually harassed while still a wrestling coach before entering politics. Indeed, what goes around comes around. Perhaps this is a lesson the Democrats should study more closely.

We like to say that justice is blind. But this is an outdated notion, as today’s Democrats are amply demonstrating. We heard them preening with self-righteous hauteur in their many attempts to take down their arch nemesis Trump that “no one is above the law.” But anyone not oblivious to what has taken place in DC and spreading to hand-picked local prosecutors across the nation can see that the law is very much selectively applied. The same Democrats who locked up a pathetic horned protester for years for the crime of taking an unauthorized guided tour of the Capitol repeatedly turned a justice is blind eye to their members’ own criminality…whether it be a House Speaker’s insider trading, a Vice President stealing away with classified documents with no claim of executive privilege to justify it, to a politicized NSA head demonstrably perjuring himself before Congress, to thousands of the party’s militant foot soldiers who for months in 2020 across 200 cities rioted, looted, stormed and burned down police precincts while committing over 1,500 assaults on members of law enforcement and even murdered some two dozen innocent bystanders.

One, of course, need not question the level of outrage Democrats would be expressing had the owner of the infamous (and verified) laptop been Eric Trump rather than Hunter Biden. Nor would their genuflecting before the law know no bounds had Don Jr. been funneling money from the CCP (a group openly hostile to the US and flooding our streets with deadly fentanyl) to his US Vice President father in exchange for access to the highest levels of government. Certainly an aggressive prosecutor would have found it much easier to find serious infractions of the law in this vein rather than for payoffs to a porn star using campaign funds.  

Again, though, this misuse of the law for political ends hasn’t just been the purview of one political party. Rather it is the inevitable result when small, power-mad individuals suddenly find themselves in positions of authority to wage war “legally” against their political rivals. And in the case of Donald Trump, the hatred is so visceral, so bizarre, that those who will stop at nothing to bring him down have lost any capacity for forward thinking that might prompt two fundamental questions. The first is stooped in patriotism: Is this good for the health of the Republic or does it not make a mockery of the rule of law, without which we are no different than any tinhorn dictatorship? The second question is based on self-preservation (an instinct politicians should know something about): Have I hurled a political boomerang that could come back to smack me in the face should the GOP ever attain real power while surrendering their own scruples to the path of vendetta?

But my concerns are not in the squabbles of political parties. I’m a member of neither so I view this from the perspective of an American citizen and what it means for us. What is happening to a former president of the USA at this moment, the use of the law as a weapon against him, could happen to anyone who finds him/herself on the wrong side of a politically motivated investigation. The fact is, as Chuck Schumer said of another lever of the Deep State, the CIA, in a chillingly revealing threat aimed at Donald Trump should he rock the establishment boat, “They have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” I don’t know which was worse. That a sitting Senator would say such a thing, or the glee with which he said it.

So, be resilient you who attempts to live your daily life without running afoul of the law. Because the fact is you most likely already have many times. Which means your livelihood, your financial security, indeed your very freedom itself is but a gracious gift from an all-powerful State that has decided, today at least, you have not crossed them enough to warrant their attention. You are not, for example, a former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi (hardly a Republican) who received a coincidental knock at the door from the IRS at the same moment he was testifying before Congress about the abuse of power by federal law enforcement agencies. You are therefore safe…for now. But be sure to remember the words of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s brutal NKVD head: “Just show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

One need be no fan of Donald Trump to be concerned. The Bad Orange Man will one day be in the past, to be remembered either as a national hero or a faded abscess, depending on your point of view. But the legal code, and those who see it not as a tool for justice but a weapon of vengeance, will remain. Tread lightly.