A year ago, I was convinced that Joe Biden was determined to stop Donald Trump from becoming president by using the legal system, and that the best way for Trump to protect himself from that was to run for president. President Obama’s Russiagate was a brazen attempt to thwart Trump with bogus allegations of colluding with Russia, but no administration would be stupid enough to actually attempt to prosecute and jail a political rival. Such things are what we say are endemic to third-world countries and banana republics.
Well, welcome to Biden’s America, where the current administration won’t just prosecute a political rival once, but multiple times, just to increase its chances of conviction. And, while they’re at it, they’ll stack the charges to increase the sentence if they can secure a conviction.
The Democratic Party, of course, is elated at what’s going on. They’ve been convinced that Donald Trump is a criminal ever since he decided to run for president. They committed themselves to impeaching him before he even took office.
But in light of recent polls showing an even race between Trump and Biden, Democrats have started to figure out that these indictments aren’t hurting their nemesis like they thought they would, and that he can still win the presidential race. And now Biden is going to shift his strategy.
The president’s team has a plan for him to shift his messaging after Labor Day to make a more “direct contrast” with Trump, a Biden adviser told NBC News. Biden has often leaned in on the message of defending democracy — including in his re-election launch video, which opened with images from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol but did not name Trump specifically. His first campaign focused on reclaiming the “soul of America.”
The effort comes as polls show Trump and Biden effectively tied in a hypothetical general election matchup, and after some Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, have cautioned Biden not to underestimate Trump’s political strengths.
So far, Biden has stuck to broadly criticizing “extreme MAGA Republicans” and mentioning the former president obliquely at off-camera campaign fundraisers.
Lately, however, Biden is focusing on trying to change the public’s perception of the economy — an impossible task because all the talking points in the world won’t change the cost of gas, groceries, and utilities. Meanwhile, perhaps in an effort to appear disconnected from the legal cases against Trump, Biden is avoiding talking about them at all. But the problem is that these legal cases can’t be disconnected from Biden because his administration is behind them. And that gives Trump free rein to define the indictments as politically motivated.
Frankly, Trump doesn’t even have to put any effort into it because just the fact that the Biden administration is prosecuting Joe Biden’s likely rival in the 2024 presidential election creates such a strong perception of political motivation that no outside influence is required.
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Over at 19FortyFive, Dr. Robert E. Kelly, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Pusan National University, argues that using the legal system against Trump will perpetuate Trumpism, and that the best way to defeat Trump is to beat him at the ballot box. “The better, more definitive, way to defeat Donald Trump is politically, by the vote. His loyalists will perceive a legal solution – jailing or disqualifying Trump – as cheating. They will agitate against it, and a ‘Trumpist’ similar to Trump would almost certainly arise to fill his shoes.”
What Kelly fails to acknowledge is that Democrats clearly aren’t confident enough that they can beat Trump at the ballot box, which is why they’re pursuing the legal route — and, in turn, giving Trump a huge edge in the public relations battle. Biden’s actions make Trump a martyr and cause a rallying effect behind him.