HAMMER: Post-Trump verdict, will the American Right finally wake up?

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Like many others in the punditry space, I am a lawyer by background. I practised law at a major global law firm. I clerked for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. I have published multiple pieces of formal legal scholarship on constitutional issues. I regularly lecture at law schools and present to professional lawyer groups across the country on assorted legal topics. I host two shows, one of which is explicitly legal-based — and with a focus, above all, on the unprecedented lawfare tactics sullying the 2024 presidential race.

In other words, I know a thing or two about the law. And I have been doing my part to sound the alarm on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s sham prosecution and eventual show trial of former president Donald Trump ever since the George Soros-backed lawman first dropped his ludicrous 34-count indictment over a year ago. There are far too many technical deficiencies in Bragg’s “case,” to say nothing of the grotesque manner in which the presiding judge comported himself at trial, to recapitulate here.

But for present purposes, the key point is this: None of those details matter. None of them.
The key points following Thursday’s first-ever criminal “conviction” of a former U.S. president, rather, are three-fold.

First, the Democrats’ long march to get the nefarious Orange Man by any means necessary, beginning with the 2016 election cycle, has finally worked. There was the Russia collusion hoax — birthed by the failed Hillary Clinton campaign and laundered through Fusion GPS and the tony law firm Perkins Coie LLP. There was the illegitimate spying on Trump campaign hands like Carter Page. There were the Democrats’ street hooligans, from the Women’s March of 2017 through the Antifa-Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. There was the constant deep state undermining of the presidential agenda. There were two bogus impeachments — for an entirely inconsequential phone call with the Ukrainian president, and for the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol jamboree that transpired mere days before Trump was set to leave town anyway. Most recently, there was the Aug. 2022 predawn FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago, and all the multistate lawfare that has followed.

And now, here we are.

Second, American patriots of all political stripes must come to terms with the current fallen state of the nation. The prosecution and incarceration of political opponents on trumped-up (no pun intended) charges is third-world, tinpot dictatorship, banana republic-type stuff — pure and simple. Americans sometimes read about foreign nations whose partisans succumb to their basest instincts, in terms of attempting to jail political opponents. Indeed, it almost has the whiff of a medieval setting — a king deposes his archrival and then condemns the vanquished foe to rot in the Tower of London. The idea that jailing one’s top political rival — and in an election year, no less — could ever happen in the land of the free and the home of the brave would have struck many of us in the not-so-distant past as too ludicrous an idea to even contemplate. But as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), no legal slouch himself, tweeted after the verdict, “If you thought it couldn’t happen in America, you were wrong.”

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Once again, then, here we are.

Third, it has never been more incumbent upon the Right to finally wake up and realize what is going on right now in this once-great nation. Many conservatives and Republicans like to wax nostalgic about blindfolded Lady Justice — about neutral enforcement of the law, and about general norms of liberal neutrality. Will those on the Right finally wake up and realize where, exactly, our attempt to seize an unsustainable faux-moral high ground has gotten us? The imperative of this late hour of the American republic, in order to even attempt to rebalance our wildly off-balance pendulum, is to respond to the Left as it has acted toward us: by wielding political and prosecutorial power to reward friends and punish enemies — to reward our side’s forces of civilizational sanity and punish their side’s forces of civilizational arson — within the broad confines of the rule of law.

If we want to get back to “neutrality,” at this perilous point, it’s going to first take bloodying up some noses. That is unfortunate for those Americans who actually do value and cherish neutral enforcement of the rule of law. But yet again, here we are.

Above all, it is imperative that the Right not bat an eyelash. Do not be intimidated by this blatant show of crass thuggery masquerading as a legal proceeding. It’s now full steam ahead through November. We must make these miscreants pay for what they have done.

— Josh Hammer is an American conservative political commentator, attorney, columnist and host of The Josh Hammer Show.