Reacting to Donald Trump’s hush-money conviction in Manhattan on 30 May, the French writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry asked on X: “Has there been a single left-of-centre person… who has said: ‘Hey, nakedly partisan prosecutions of your political opponents goes against the values of liberal democracy, rule of law, justice, and everything my side claims to support?’”
A number of progressive figures have, in fact, decried lawfare against
Trump and the Trumpians. The law professor Samuel Moyn, the civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald, the left economist Christian Parenti, and the heterodox Marxists clustered around
Sublation magazine, among others, have maintained that in a democracy, politics should mainly be conducted in the voting booth, not in the courts or the interrogation rooms of the FBI.
But the honour roll of the principled anti-lawfare left is all too short. That’s a shame, because right-wing populists won’t be the only victims.
Does Manhattan district attorney (DA) Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump count as lawfare? You bet. As the former federal and state prosecutor Elie Honig wrote in
New York magazine, “The DA’s charges against Trump push the outer boundaries of the law and due process.” To wit, Bragg pressed a boutique legal theory “seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else” – a classic form of prosecutorial abuse.
The basic crime at issue was Trump’s falsification of business records related to a non-disclosure payment to his porn-star paramour Stormy Daniels. But as Honig pointed out, a falsification charge is a mere misdemeanour under New York law, thus unlikely to generate global headlines. Plus, the statute of limitations on Trump’s fiddling with his records had long expired.