Leave it to Lara Trump to put her father-in-law’s trial in perspective.
As the establishment media does its best to treat former President Donald Trump’s court case like a legitimate matter, and the more leftist elements virtually salivate over Trump being treated like a criminal, the co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee called out the farce in an appearance Tuesday on Fox News.
And in the process, she made the bigger picture clearer.
In an interview with “Fox & Friends” co-host Lawrence Jones, the wife of Eric Trump skewered the show-trial circus coverage that has blanketed the Republican presidential candidate’s criminal trial in New York City, which got underway Monday.
But first, Jones played a montage of statements from leftist cable news personalities such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Jen Psaki attacking Trump on a personal basis — and the left’s undisguised glee at the “psychological torture” the trial presents for him.
Check out the interview here:
“These people are so deranged and they’re completely disconnected, obviously, from the people of this country. They only stand to exist in their own echo chambers,” Lara Trump said, summing up the insular left-wing media mentality nicely.
“That’s the only reason they are talking, and their obsession with Donald Trump is actually preventing them from understanding that it’s not Donald Trump that’s truly on trial here,” she said.
Is Donald Trump being prosecuted for political reasons?
But then she got into the real issue. The Trump trial in Manhattan — and the other fronts in the Democratic lawfare being waged against him — represent a Rubicon in American politics.
What’s taking place at the hands of district attorneys in New York and Fulton County, Georgia, and in special prosecutor Jack Smith’s cases in Florida and the nation’s capital, amounts to a willful distortion of the “justice” system that’s more in line with the Communist Party-controlled machinations of the old Soviet Union than the legacy established by American legal giants from John Jay to Clarence Thomas.
Even Democrats should know that sane Americans who know who Lavrentiy Beria was don’t like him. Sane Americans who don’t know who he was don’t want to live under the “show me the man and I’ll find you the crime” kind of system he embodied.
For people who are always claiming to be on the right side of history, leftists seem to understand damn little of it.
What’s happening in that Manhattan courtroom — where even picking a jury is complicated by the hopeless bias of the venue — is more than the railroading of one man.
“It is our very democracy” that’s at stake, Lara Trump told Jones.
“Because, yes, it is Donald Trump today that you will see sitting in the courtroom for this completely meritless, clown-show of a show trial, but the implications of this are far deeper for this country,” she said.
“Because if, in America, we are able to just manipulate the law when convenient, if we allow violent criminals to go free and prosecute the innocent, if they are willing to thwart the will of the American people and try to remove our choice for president of the United States, then the fabric of this country is irreparably damaged,” Trump said.
That sounds like the kind of high-blown “democracy on the ballot” rhetoric the country hears too much from the left already, but in this case, it’s dead on.
As former federal prosecutor and National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy has explained repeatedly, most recently in a column published on Sunday, the case against Trump being brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a jerry-rigged Frankenstein.
It’s made up of at most a misdemeanor charge, which had passed under the statute of limitations, that has been tortured into 34 separate felonies, with a legal rationale that’s questionable at best.
But the Democratic obsession to destroy the single biggest obstacle to the leftist agenda in the United States is uncontrollable.
It’s on display in New York at the moment. It’s behind the laughable, patently corrupted RICO case against Trump in Georgia; it’s behind the drive of Jack Smith and his federal cases in Florida and Washington.
This, in short, is serious stuff. Not in the sense that there’s anything serious or credible about the criminal case — all the solemnity establishment media anchors can intone won’t make Bragg’s monstrosity a legitimate use of state power.
Even Americans who don’t support Trump need to understand that the persecution being engineered against him in the service of the political party currently wielding state power won’t stop with Trump.
This is legal prosecution for political purposes, and if it stands, it will — as Lara Trump said — irreparably damage the country the system is meant to serve.
There are signs much of the nation knows this — outside of the coastal woke zones. Lara Trump told Jones that her father-in-law’s presidential campaign had raised $1.5 million on Monday, the day the 45th president became the first former chief executive to enter a courtroom as a criminal defendant.
The average amount of donations, she said, was $28. That’s not money coming from the millionaire and billionaire class. And it’s almost certainly coming from people who don’t have even $28 to spend lightly.
What’s happening to Trump is a big deal, and Americans need to understand it even if the establishment media and its most leftist voices pretend it’s all about one man.
Lara Trump knows better.
It isn’t Donald Trump that’s really on trial here. It’s the American system as it’s stood for almost two-and-a-half centuries.
Conservatives and Republicans need to make sure that by November, the rest of the country does, too.
