When Republicans find themselves unable to defend something Donald Trump has done, they tend to look for a way to turn the blame onto his opponents. So it is with the president’s prosecutorial rampage against his enemies.
The anti-anti-Trump right has declared that, although a series of vindictive charges against the likes of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James may be regrettable, Democrats brought it on themselves.
“Two wrongs do not make a right, but Democrats did start this,” argued the conservative columnist and talk-radio host Erick Erickson. It “should be beyond dispute that the Biden-era lawfare campaign against Donald Trump was both a huge electoral failure and a disaster for American civics,” wrote the columnist Dan McLaughlin in the National Review. The Washington Post’s now-right-of-center Opinion section similarly complained: “Many Democrats still cannot see how their legal aggression against Trump during his four years out of power set the stage for the dangerous revenge tour on which he is now embarked.”
This attempt to rationalize Trump’s push to lock up his enemies as payback suffers from two enormous flaws. The first involves the space-time continuum. Trump spent his first term desperately looking for ways to prosecute or otherwise harm his adversaries. He endlessly demanded that the Justice Department go after a long list of targets, including, among many others, every recent Democratic presidential nominee (John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden). His appointee at the IRS also subjected Comey himself, as well as Andrew McCabe, his successor at the FBI, to IRS audits.
Most of Trump’s aspirations failed, but only because the Justice Department was run by officials who at least generally hewed to its norms of independence. Trump has since overcome this barrier.
The second problem with the karma theory is that it accepts at face value Trump’s claim that he was a victim of lawfare. Trump was no victim of the legal system. If anything, he received preferential treatment.
Trump faced a wide array of legal travails during Biden’s presidency. The case that Trump and his defenders usually fixate on is his conviction for campaign-finance violations stemming from the hush-money payment to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Many legal analysts argued that the case was legitimate but too marginal to merit prosecution. I agreed at the time that Trump’s treatment in this case was harsher than what an average person might receive in similar circumstances. But the Manhattan case was not brought by “the Democrats,” or even an official appointed by the Biden administration. It was pursued by one elected local Democratic prosecutor, Alvin Bragg.
More important, in every other case where Trump faced prosecution, he benefited from notably lenient treatment by prosecutors, the courts, or both.
Trump faced two legal cases involving his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election: a local case in Georgia and a federal case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith. That Trump’s effort to steal the election was unlawful was hardly a partisan view. When Senate Republicans voted not to convict Trump for it in his 2021 impeachment trial, then–Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested the matter should be left to the courts. If either party could be blamed for turning Trump’s coup attempt into a legal concern rather than a political one, it was surely the Republicans.
Trump managed to skirt both raps, not because he did nothing wrong but because the courts allowed him to drag both cases out. The DOJ does not prosecute sitting presidents, so Trump’s reelection ensured they were both dismissed.
Trump deployed this strategy to similarly wriggle out of a separate federal case involving his mishandling of classified documents. His violations could not have been clearer: He took a huge amount of classified material from the White House, stored it all in comically unsecured locations (such as a Mar-a-Lago bathroom), repeatedly lied to the government about it, and directed subordinates to lie on his behalf.
Yet a judge Trump had appointed while president simply dismissed the case on the first day of the Republican National Convention in 2024. The conservative Supreme Court, steered by three of Trump’s own appointees, helped him further with an extraordinary party-line ruling granting presidents broad immunity from prosecution.
All of this makes it rather hard to argue that Trump was treated especially harshly by the legal system. A more parsimonious explanation for why Trump kept getting prosecuted, and why Republican presidents and candidates such as George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney never did, is that Trump has spent his entire career treating laws as unhelpful suggestions.
The evidence to support this is considerable, including his defiance of Justice Department orders to stop discriminating against Black tenants nearly five decades ago, his habitual refusal to pay his bills, and his penchant for grift. Before he was elected president the first time, Republicans regularly questioned his mob ties and called him a con artist.
If you were to have told party elites 10 years ago that Trump would go on to lose his first reelection bid, try to stay in office anyway, and then face a series of legal prosecutions, they would have likely figured Trump had been playing fast and loose with the law once again. They would have been right.
The post Don’t Blame the Democrats for Trump’s Revenge Tour appeared first on The Atlantic.
