These days, there is a tendency for voters on both sides of the political aisle to brush off the latest indictment of Donald Trump. Democrats have long been convinced he is guilty of more crimes than they can even count. Republicans have seen this movie so many times before and, remarkably, responded to each set of charges with even higher levels of support for the 45th president.
At the same time, independent voters bombarded with the Trump-as-Satan narrative for more than eight years have grown exhausted and bored by it all. But maybe they were jolted, for better or worse, by Trump’s declaration to supporters following his indictment by special counsel Jack Smith related to 1/6/21 – on top of those previously brought by Smith for retaining classified documents and by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg – bringing to 78 the number of charges now pending against him:
“I could now face a combined 561 YEARS in prison from the Left’s witch hunts.”
This begs the burning question: What happens if Trump is convicted of one or more crimes? If he fails to win the 2024 election, justice will simply take its course, and given the relentless, single-minded pursuit by his enemies in Biden’s justice department, it is increasingly difficult to envision him escaping prison altogether. But with both federal and state indictments in place, what if Trump wins the election?
Donald Trump as Pardoner-in-Chief
The Constitution says the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” But as Liberty Nation Legal Affairs Editor Scott Cosenza points out, that power has its limits:
“The president can pardon anyone, including himself, for any federal crime. Governors typically have pardon power over state charges (as in New York, and likely soon in Georgia for election interference), but the president has none. It is possible Trump could face prison after serving another term as president. We’re in totally uncharted territory with these prosecutions in the first place. We have to assume that if he wins the presidency, his first official act would be to pardon himself for every federal crime he may have committed. Then he would order the DOJ to cancel their prosecution of him. The best way for him to avoid prison time for federal charges is to win back the presidency.”
In terms of the likelihood of prosecution on federal charges, Jack Smith has already been embarrassed and upbraided by the Supreme Court once, when the guilty verdict for corruption which he induced for former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell was unanimously overturned. And you can be dead certain any conviction of Trump which he might engineer will go all the way up the ladder to the Supremes once more.
Democrats Won’t Be So Lucky This Time
Is there good reason for Democrats to be trembling in their boots about Trump? Well, consider the truly unprecedented circumstances it required to allow Biden to barely cross the 2020 finish line in a race decided by some 40 thousand votes in three states (Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia). It took a once-in-a-century pandemic, leading to widespread death, destruction of the economy, the introduction of new voting laws gift-wrapped for Democrats, and a breakdown of law and order in unchecked BLM-inspired mob violence across the land. Finally, it took the lies of more than 50 “national security experts” and the refusal of Biden-supporting big media to even acknowledge the sewer of corruption revealed in the Hunter Biden laptop, which polling shows would likely have flipped the election to Trump.
Donald Trump (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
The Democrats have none of that to exploit in 2024. For some time, the common belief has been that they actually want Trump to win the Republican nomination because he would be the easiest to defeat. But now it appears they have become fearful enough of Trump’s chances to re-take the Oval Office that they are forced into the last resort of scoundrels: arresting him – three times, so far, and likely a fourth in the coming days. It all has a distinct odor of Stalinist justice, effectively summarized in the expression “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Perhaps some or all of the charges are genuine, you might say. But how are we to know when the base motivation of the accusers is so shockingly apparent? Common sense leads to a very simple conclusion, no matter one’s ideological beliefs. If you lied to us and led us down a primrose path about something as serious and vile as the charge that Trump was a traitor, why would we believe you now?
At Least They’re Ruling Out Execution
Even those driven to madness by Trump are quite aware of how political all these indictments appear. In response to Trump’s assertion that his indictment is akin to justice in Nazi Germany, The Nation, longtime voice of the left, actually responded as if that charge was legitimate enough to require a rebuttal, arguing that, if he is convicted, “the ex-president most certainly won’t be summarily executed, or tortured, or marched off to a concentration camp for domestic political prisoners—all of which were likely endpoints for German politicians who ran afoul of Hitler’s regime.”
Good to know. Thanks for clarifying.
In addition, this time around, thanks to aggressive investigations and revelations by the GOP-controlled House, Republicans at least possess ample ammunition to assert that charges of corruption – the very type of which Trump has constantly been accused – are equally valid in the case of his successor’s naked influence peddling, details of which are emerging in a slow drip which the GOP hopes will serve as political Chinese water torture.
The shocking outcome of the 2016 election proved that those who believe in the supremacy of the central state are so radically out of touch with the common man that they fail to see what everyone else does. Trump’s continuing strength in the polls, even as the left attempts to conflate January 6 to the level of 9/11 or the Civil War, demonstrates that the non-stop assault by his enemies is actually validating all of Trump’s claims about the rank corruption of the Washington ruling elite. The iron pentagon of government, media, academia, law enforcement, and intelligence took the presidency from him through deceit and slander, burying his accomplishments and fabricating scandals designed to divert the attention of the American people. But that strategy hardly seems to be working this time around. Trump is living proof of the familiar slogan about that which doesn’t kill us making us stronger.
In 2016, Donald Trump was a heavy underdog as a bombastic outsider unlike anyone before him, promising to march into DC and break the furniture. In 2020, he became an underdog once more, brought low by the pandemic – in a presidential election year, no less. But in 2024, as neither the outsider he was in 2016 nor the incumbent he was in 2020, and despite his mountain of legal woes, he actually appears better positioned to win the presidency than ever before.
