We live in unprecedented times, with former President Trump now facing three separate indictments with seventy-eight felony charges. Simultaneously, Congressional committee investigation hearings have produced voluminous information about substantive corruption of current President Biden and his family.
Now with Biden seemingly enjoying a beach vacation and Congress in its August recess, the American people get a break to digest and think about what’s going down. And, because there is no matching precedent for any of this, it’s necessary to approach all of it with discernment and common sense.
Fundamentally, most can see this is more than a legal battle in courts with judges and juries. This is a battle between the administrative elite-deep state who want to keep and aggrandize their power and the unearned spoils that ensue, and the people who want equal justice and a fair playing field. With there being no compromise on this, Trump has to be eliminated or destroyed. The previous efforts to stop Trump through the special counsel Mueller investigation about collusion with Russia and two subsequent impeachment attempts all failed.
The battle is more vicious now because Biden and the deep state are cornered and desperate. They know that if Trump wins re-election, he will have lawbreakers prosecuted, and turn over Washington’s money changing tables that provide kickbacks from Ukraine and from other U.S. foreign aid recipients. And Trump will certainly close the southern border and stop the illicit flows of money from criminal cartels’ drug, child, and sex trafficking.
The strategy to destroy Trump has two main components. Trial by media follows an old playbook. Three indictments may look like overkill, but the strategy is to crowd out and diminish media coverage of the Biden scandals while flooding the media with coverage of Trump’s legal travails, thus attempting to amplify his alleged wrongdoing and guilt and subliminally influence people to conclude that with Trump there is so much smoke from different cases and jurisdictions, there must be a fire. Second, deep state Democrat lawfare is designed to drain Trump’s campaign resources by forcing him to pay high legal bills while keeping him off the campaign trail with time-consuming legal requirements, such as depositions and hearings.
However, the deep state and Democrat elite strategists may be mistaken in thinking they can make this a successful legal case adjudicated by anti-Trump courts. With every indictment, Trump’s poll numbers and fundraising go up.
The real judge and jury on Donald Trump should be the voting citizens of the United States, who generally possess common sense and fair-mindedness.
When the average American compares what we have learned and experienced in the last two and a half years with what people experienced under the Trump administration in pre-Covid years from 2017 to 2020, there is an incredibly stark and clear contrast. Ten points for consideration:
1. First, there is a complete contrast in Trump’s undeniably genuine patriotism and love for America, compared with Biden who fluctuates between authoritarian vindictiveness and ambivalence toward America—its flag, culture, and heritage. And no one really wants to attend a Biden political rally if he had one.
2. The starkest contrast in character is between Trump’s magnanimity to forgo compensation while serving as President, and Joe Biden’s exploitation of public office, wherein he received millions through son Hunter’s payoffs for providing political access to his father, and his shakedown of figures, both from unsavory foreign countries, including Ukraine, Russia and America’s #1 enemy, China.
3. There is sharp contrast between Trump’s commitment to building a wall to secure America’s border, and Biden who immediately stopped that wall construction and issued an executive order to liberalize immigrant entry and open the floodgates of illegal migrants.
4. Migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border the first year of Trump’s administration reached the lowest levels since the 1970s, whereas Biden’s first year migrant encounters at the border reached the highest level on record.
5. In Trump’s last year in office—2020, fentanyl deaths in America reached about 55,000, but by Biden’s second year—2022, fentanyl deaths doubled to 109,000.
6. In his first year, President Biden singlehandedly turned Trump’s achievement of low gasoline prices and energy independence achieved in 2019 (the first time since 1957) into dependence on foreign oil, a 40% depletion of the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve that negatively affects U.S. military readiness, and dramatic inflation in fuel costs that ripples throughout the entire economy.
7. In his first year, Biden blew the inheritance from Trump’s rebuilding the American military by his colossal failure in retreat and withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left behind some $85 billion in advanced U.S. military hardware, and cost 180 lives—including 13 U.S. service personnel.
8. In 2022 Biden got the U.S. into war in Ukraine without clear objectives in contrast to Trump who, for his entire term, kept the U.S. out of war, while quickly defeating ISIS and keeping enemies at bay through surgical strikes against the Syrian air force and Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
9. On the domestic front, violent crime has dramatically increased across the country in most major cities under Democrat control and exacerbated by Biden’s open border policy, compared to the relative stability of Trump's administration pre-Covid.
10. U.S. public schools, already underperforming, are facing a crisis of epic proportions since Biden became president, seen in new low performance scores but also visible in widespread protests from parents about the indoctrination of their children.
Americans with a variety of beliefs and different political affiliations recognize that conditions in America have deteriorated dramatically from where they were in the first three years of the Trump administration before the so-called Covid pandemic. They also know that it is always best to judge political leaders not on what they say and what the media spins, but rather on what their actions deliver.
The real judge and jury adjudication on Donald Trump should not be made in biased courts by politically driven prosecutions, but by voting citizens who are fully capable of assessing comparative results.
Scott Powell is senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His timeless book, Rediscovering America, was #1 new release in history for eight straight weeks (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637581599). Reach him at scottp@discovery.org