Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a presidential contender nine years ago, America’s most esteemed scholars and journalists have argued that he was violating democratic norms. Trump, they said, was ignoring the stabilizing, unwritten rules and values of American politics. This was evident in his vulgar language, vilification of immigrants, criticisms of the press, lack of cooperation with the intelligence community, and refusal to accept the 2020 election results.
But the Democrats’ relentless effort to imprison Trump has undermined the rule of law, faith in the criminal justice system, and democratic norms more than anything Trump has ever done.
According to multiple credible sources, President Barack Obama’s Director of the CIA, in the summer of 2016, illegally mobilized foreign spy agencies to target 26 Trump advisors to claim, falsely, that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin controlled Trump.
Then, in January 2017, after Trump had been elected but before he took office, the U.S. Intelligence Community falsely claimedthat Putin had favored the election of Trump when, in reality, the intelligence showed that Putin favored Hillary Clinton.
After taking office, current and former US government intelligence operatives and Democrats falsely claimed that Russian disinformation on social media had resulted in Trump’s election and worked with the Department of Homeland Security to censor social media platforms.
None of this is a defense of Trump. He uses extreme and inflammatory rhetoric, particularly about immigrants, that I strongly disagree with. He was wrong to deny and try to change the results of the 2020 elections. And I think people are right to fear that, if he were re-elected, he could weaponize the government to exact revenge on his political enemies.
But that fear is further proof of the danger of Democrats weaponizing the government. Democrats went far beyond anything Trump did when it came to abusing their political power. After the Supreme Court ruled that Biden could not legally forgive student loans, he did so anyway. By contrast, Trump did not violate any Supreme Court rulings.
It’s true that Trump has criticized judges, journalists, and intelligence agencies, but why is that a bad thing? We have a separation of powers for a reason.
As for the intelligence agencies, they broke the law multiple times in targeting Trump. As for the news media, they deserve criticism for losing the public’s trust after lying about everything from the origins of Covid to the efficacy of the Covid vaccine to the Russiagate hoax.
Or consider the prosecution of Trump for supposedly taking and holding onto classified documents. It’s not obvious that Trump put national security in greater danger than Biden. There is evidence that the Biden administration worked with the National Archives and Department of Justice to demand the confrontation. And there is the possibility that the raid was motivated in order to recover documents related to the Russiagate hoax.
And the abuse of the court system by Democrats in an effort to incarcerate Trump and keep him off the ballot is far more of a violation of norms than anything Trump ever dreamed of.
The recent felony conviction of Trump for falsifying business records relies on the idea that he misclassified campaign payments. Democrats say, “Nobody is above the law,” which is true. But Democrats are wrong to ignore the fact that prosecutors are constantly making choices about whether to pursue certain cases over others. Indeed, Hillary Clinton was found to have mislabeled payments related to the Steele dossier during her 2016 campaign, and she was never prosecuted. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) merely fined Clinton and the Democratic National Convention (DNC)) for this misconduct.
In fact, everything about New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s recent conviction of Trump is abnormal. For starters, Bragg campaigned on the promise to prosecute Trump. He turned the misdemeanor of falsifying business records into a felony by tying it to election interference. The case was so weak that both the Department of Justice and the former DA refused to prosecute it.
The judge in the case donated to Biden and his daughter is the president of a Democratic Party fundraising firm whose clients include Rep. Adam Schiff, who led the Russiagate hoax. The judge told the jurors that they didn’t need to agree on what crime Trump intended to commit by falsifying records.
The case confused even legal experts. “At the start of closing arguments,” wrote legal scholar Jonathan Turley, “most honest observers were still wondering what the prosecutors were alleging as to the crime that Trump was allegedly concealing with the falsification of business records.”
Even CNN’s top legal scholar, Elie Honig, who is also a former colleague of Bragg, said the trial violated norms. “Prosecutors Got Trump But They Contorted the Law,” explained Honig in New York Magazine. “The charges against Trump are obscure and nearly entirely unprecedented,” he said. “In fact, no state prosecutor— in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime against anyone for anything. None. Ever.”
All of this is a radical change from the ideals of the Democratic Party just a few years ago. In the 1970s and 1980s, Democrats fought to restrict and reform the intelligence community so that it would stop spying on American citizens for their political activities. Democrats defended a high standard for free speech, including the right of Nazis to march through neighborhoods of Holocaust survivors. And since the 1990s, Democrats have raised the alarm about the abuse of prosecutorial power and elected progressive prosecutors, including Bragg, to reduce prosecutions of nonviolent crimes.
Today, Democrats are pioneering new ways to weaponize the government....
Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the rest of the video!
In the video above, I erroneously said, "New York Times Magazine" when referring to a New York magazine article by @eliehonig. (The text is correct). Here is the article:
Whether @AGPamBondi , @FBIDirectorKash , and/or @FBIDDBongino stay or go, one thing is clear: the Trump admin. must release the Epstein Files. It's our God-given right to know. The issue has transcended partisanship, and neither the Right nor Left are moving on.
Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz just now: " I know for a fact [Epstein] documents are being suppressed and they're being suppressed to protect individuals. I know the names of the individuals, I know why they're being suppressed. I know who's suppressing them, but I'm bound by confidentiality from a judge and cases, and I can't disclose what I know. But, hand to God, I know the names of people whose files are being suppressed in order to protect them, and that's wrong."
@SeanSpicer : “Just out of curiosity, without names, are these politicians, business leaders…”
Dershowtiz: “Both. Everything.”
The lip synching is messed up but it's real and not AI. Here's the original:
Correction: The video is from 3 months ago. @seanspicer posted it just now.
Within minutes of Texas floods killing dozens of girls, the media said it was because of Trump budget cuts and climate change. In truth, the deaths occurred in “one of the highest flood-prone regions in the entire state,” warnings were issued, and the underlying cause was the failure to install flood warning sirens. Climate journalists are cultists.
Trump cuts to the National Weather Service, and climate change, are to blame for the Texas flood deaths, said the media yesterday. Today, most admit NWS did its job. The real problem was the lack of a flood warning system. Those who blame the climate are trapped in a weird cult.
Per capita flooding deaths in Texas declined dramatically:
"As the population of Texas increased from ~9.2 million in 1958 to ~28.6 million in 2018, overall flood deaths remained fairly constant, meaning that the fatality rate dropped by about two-thirds." @RogerPielkeJr
More Pielke: "The flooding was certainly extreme but it should not have been historically unexpected. The documented record of extreme flooding in “flash flood alley” goes back several centuries, with paleoclimatology records extending that record thousands of years into the past.
"Consider the figure above, from a classic 1940 historical text on U.S. floods, which shows that the same region of Texas that experienced this week’s floods has long been known to be a bullseye for flash flooding. In fact, almost a century before Hoyt and Langbein, Texas experienced one of the greatest losses of life in U.S. history related to extreme weather.
"In 1846, in the months after Texas became a U.S. state, massive flooding compounded the many problems facing thousands of recent immigrants from Germany who had been settled in New Braunfels, Texas, which was significantly impacted by this week’s floods.
"According to a contemporaneous 1846 account, cited in a fantastic 2006 PhD dissertation on flooding in Texas by William Keith Guthrie, at the University of Kansas, 'The Guadalupe [River] would often rise fifteen feet above its normal stand after these heavy rains, carrying with it in its swift torrent a number of large trees, uprooted farther up the hills. Smaller brooks, ordinarily not containing flowing water, became raging torrents which could be crossed only by swimming.'"
The website of NYC mayoral frontrunner says he'll "shift the tax burden" to "whiter neighborhoods." When asked about his openly racist agenda, @ZohranKMamdani insists it's not a proposal at all but rather "a description of what we see right now." That's next-level gaslighting.😬
This guy's ability to lie so calmly while smiling should send chills up the spines of every New Yorker.
He could have taken it down and said, "You know, I regret that the website said that and so I deleted it, because it doesn't express what I believe."
Instead, he's just asked millions of New Yorkers to believe his own obviously flagrant lie rather than their own eyes. That's creepy and wrong.
Everyone can see for themselves that he used a gratuitous racial reference regarding a tax proposal. We don't tax people on race. So why use it? Because he and his campaign wanted to introduce race.
And it's not the first time. @ZohranKMamdani should delete his flagrantly racist tweets and web site language, apologize, and promise to never invoke racism in these ways again.
The audacity of @ZohranKMamdani to cite Dr. Martin Luther King should make your skin crawl. King adamantly rejected anti-white racism.
Mamdani’s call for higher taxes on white neighborhoods should shock New Yorkers. If they elect him as Mayor then they will have no excuses. He’s made clear that he will advance a racist agenda and then demand that people believe his lies.
The idea that former Intelligence Community officials are working with European leaders to censor the Internet sounds like a conspiracy theory, but over the last two days, Obama’s CIA Director plotted with UK, EU, and Irish officials in Dublin to do precisely that.
These people are a direct and imminent threat to free speech and democracy worldwide. They are dangerous and out of control:
Former CIA Director John Brennan helped initiate the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. He used foreign spies to help trigger the FBI investigation of of the Trump campaign. And he manipulated the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment to falsely claim the Russians favored Trump over Clinton.
Niamh Hodnett, Ireland’s “Online Safety Commissioner,” leads Ireland’s censorship regime under the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act, which mirrors EU and U.S.-backed models shaped by intelligence-linked NGOs.
Aine Kerr, a Former Facebook Policy Manager, helped manage Facebook’s public policy as it partnered with U.S. intelligence agencies post-2016, then co-founded Kinzen, which received support from EU and transatlantic institutions focused on content surveillance. Her work connects platform moderation with state-funded narrative monitoring.
Nóirín O’Sullivan, a Former Garda (Irish police) Commissioner and EUROPOL Official, who went from leading Ireland’s national police to a senior role at EUROPOL, which works closely with intelligence and security services across Europe. She advocates for integrating security principles into online content governance.
Claire Loftus, Ireland’s Former Director of Public Prosecutions, oversaw prosecutions during a period of expanding legal efforts to criminalize online expression and misinformation. Her presence signals an effort to align the judiciary with state-backed censorship.
Robyn Simcox, the UK Commissioner for Countering Extremism,
operates within the UK Home Office, a department with direct ties to MI5 and GCHQ. She frames conspiracy theories and misinformation as forms of radicalization and demands surveillance and preemptive regulation. Her office channels intelligence priorities into speech policing under the banner of counter-extremism.