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