The craziest thing about Donald Trump’s trial in Manhattan is that it happened at all.
For those of us with some recent family history in the Third World, or the communist world, what made America exceptional was that this sort of thing would not happen here — i.e. trials in which the ruling party tried to imprison its opponents based on fabricated charges.
In Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, Trump was on trial for a crime that was known only to the prosecution, never fully explained.
“Falsification of business records to conceal …” what, exactly? The prosecution presented no evidence of that mysterious other crime. The judge told the jury that they did not even have to agree what it was.
It was a scene out of a Kafka novel, or Stalin’s tyranny.
The case should have been thrown out from the moment it was brought, based on a jury-rigged (pun intended) indictment that tried to shoehorn a federal crime into a state court, a felony into an expired misdemeanor.
Merchan — a Biden donor, and father to a Democratic Party consultant — should never have been appointed.
He should have recused himself based on his daughter’s Democratic Party activism and her ties to the prosecution, including impeachment counsel-turned-congressman Dan Goldman.
He should have allowed the defense to call expert witnesses on campaign finance law.
These were not hard calls to make.
Instead, Judge Merchan did what so many others have done in the past two decades — whether out of millenarian hope in Barack Obama, or out of apocalyptic fear of Trump: he set aside his duty and acted with arbitrary power to further a partisan goal.
This is the hallmark of failing civilizations — a rejection of the rule of law for the sake of private or partisan interests, noble or otherwise.
It is a scenario described at the end of the Book of Judges, in the Old Testament, as a time in which “each man did what was right in his [own] eyes,” (21:25) a prelude to anarchy.
We see the same pattern everywhere in our society.
Take our college campuses, recently roiled by anti-Israel demonstrations and “encampments” that disrupted university life and demanded the total destruction of Israel, a sovereign nation. Arguably, even antisemitic speech is free speech — but most of these universities have rules against hate speech.
All that the universities had to do was enforce their own rules consistently. Most failed to do so, indulging the hateful protests and destroying what little faith the public had left in academia.
Or consider the media, which refused to hold Obama accountable for his job performance in office, and dropped all pretense of objectivity when Trump became president.
Respected publications pumped out lies about “Russian collusion,” or enthusiastically censored the truth about Joe Biden’s corruption, then rewarded themselves with Pulitzer Prizes and plaudits about saving democracy.
All they had to do was report the facts and allow the public to draw their own conclusions. They became activists, and ended public faith in the press.
Our law enforcement and intelligence services have also taken sides. Hillary Clinton illegally hosted government emails on her private server, likely to conceal her family’s corruption. Some of the emails had classified information and could have been hacked by America’s enemies. She later had the emails deleted, never to be recovered.
The Department of Justice declined to prosecute her, despite the letter of the law. It was an election year, you see.
In the same campaign, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired an opposition research firm to fabricate evidence of Russian “collusion” with Trump. They fed it to the media and the FBI, which lied to a federal judge to obtain surveillance warrants.
The Clinton campaign falsely reported the money as “legal expenses.”
Years later, they had to pay a fine or two. Hillary Clinton was never prosecuted.
The military, once the most respected of all American institutions, simply needed to maintain its devotion to the Constitution and its neutral posture on politics.
Instead, the Biden Administration ordered the military to purge Trump supporters from its ranks and turned the U.S. armed forces into vehicles for LGBTQ activism.
Small wonder that recruitment has plummeted, and the image and effectiveness of the military has suffered.
There is no worse symbol of failure than the military’s floating pier in Gaza, built for purely political reasons, breaking this week.
Duty is straightforward. Boring, perhaps, but simple and necessary.
The reason democracy works is that the political opposition still behaves — or did, until recently — as though it still has a duty to support the country, even as it opposes the government.
But Democrats set that aside with the so-called “Resistance” to Trump, which rejected the results of the 2016 election and tried to undermine the Trump presidency.
Now that it is in power, the “Resistance” has used its “lawfare” to pursue Trump, as well as his advisers and supporters.
That “lawfare” reached its nadir this week in Judge Merchan’s courtroom — and outside the courthouse, where the Biden campaign staged a press conference Tuesday with actor Robert De Niro that destroyed any pretense that the case against Trump was not political at its core.
The Biden campaign reportedly cheered the verdict. They should have cursed it. Even if Biden somehow wins, his election will never be regarded as legitimate, and half the country will have lost all faith in the judicial system.
So much for “restoring” the rule of law, as Biden promised.
We have entered the darkest period of our country’s history since the Civil War. The good news is that if President Trump wins, he will have the most sweeping mandate for change in the history of America. The whole corrupt edifice of government, dominated by Democrats, is going to have to be gutted and rebuilt.
And there will be prosecutions, both fair and unfair.
Democrats like to talk about never letting a crisis go to waste. They may be about to learn what that really means.
And if not — if Biden “wins” — few will regard the result as legitimate. Our country will become even more divided — and weaker, unable to defend itself in an increasingly dangerous world.
The rule of law has collapsed. It will take a generation, at least, to rebuild.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.