If not for a last-minute postponement, a Manhattan judge would have sentenced Donald Trump for the former president’s conviction last May by the time this article appeared, in what could fairly be characterized by an objective observer as a politically motivated trial, intended to hamper his 2024 presidential campaign. The charges pushed the “outer boundaries of the law and due process,” according to a former federal and state prosecutor, now working as an analyst for CNN—not exactly a bastion of conservative bias. The judge in the trial, Juan Merchan, previously violated New York State ethics rules by donating to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and to a group called Stop Republicans. The judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, a professional political operative, has done campaign work for both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. After repeatedly refusing to recuse himself over such conflicts of interest, Merchan barred Trump’s lawyers from arguing that the trial might be politically motivated. He had originally scheduled the sentencing for September 18, roughly six weeks before the election. (In late August, Trump was also reindicted on election-subversion charges by special counsel Jack Smith, in what Politico described as “an attempt to recalibrate the case after the Supreme Court’s immunity decision” in July.)
The shift to legal warfare was foreshadowed in the lead-up to the 2020 race. One notable case involves the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), an election initiative launched in 2019 under the auspices of a different group, Protect Democracy, founded by a team of lawyers who had served as White House counsels under Obama. The project, explained one of its founders, Ian Bassin, grew “out of concern that the Trump administration may seek to manipulate” the 2020 election.
The initiative gathered roughly 100 influential people, including leading Democratic officials, like Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta, and members of the media and NGO world, to wargame potential scenarios resulting from a contested election. In one scenario, Podesta, playing the role of Joe Biden, refused to accept a Trump election victory and threatened to seize control over several West Coast states and secede from the rest of the country unless congressional Republicans agreed to demands, including the elimination of the Electoral College. The move was sufficiently egregious to provoke criticism from other participants in the wargame. And yet, according to the TIP report on the event, Podesta’s secession gambit, far from a flight of personal fancy, was carried out “with advice from President Obama.” In a detailed report on TIP’s exercises, Matt Taibbi describes “multiple passages on the subject of abiding by and/or trusting in the law, and how this can be a weakness.”
The original information operation of the modern era, the Russia-collusion hoax, hijacked the American political system and has yet to let it go. The false claim that Donald Trump was a Kremlin agent and that Russia “hacked” the 2016 election was—to borrow a term—disinformation, launched into the nation’s political culture by Obama and Clinton officials, working with top U.S. intelligence figures, including former CIA chief John Brennan. It was Brennan who inserted the fabricated Steele Dossier into the official record by including it in an official CIA report. With the imprimatur of credentialed intelligence professionals, the Russiagate conspiracy was then spread by a credulous media apparatus and reinforced by think tank and academic “experts.” Most significantly, it led to special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation of the Trump campaign’s purported collusion with Russia to sway the 2016 election, which found no evidence of such a conspiracy.
In a sense, the lack of fearmongering about Trump being a “Kremlin stooge” is one of the most conspicuous features of the current election. The Russia trope hasn’t disappeared entirely—one article published in August warned of “How Russian gender-based disinformation could influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election”—but its diminishing significance suggests both public exhaustion with the strategy and a maturation of the informational control system.
The party-state’s ability to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris in a matter of weeks, and with the support of Democratic voters (in effect, disenfranchising 15 million primary voters who had overwhelmingly endorsed the president’s reelection bid) and most of the media, signals that it now has the power to make more or less anything seem normal. Having conditioned the public to accept a constant stream of propaganda, party officials can now openly laugh about how preposterous and unconvincing their own talking points have become—as recently happened when California governor and likely future presidential candidate Gavin Newsom was asked on the Obama-bro Pod Save America show how he was feeling about “the switch” that replaced Biden with Harris. Newsom responded by mocking the very absurdity of the question. “We went through a very open process, a very inclusive process,” Newsom said, while guffawing with the show’s hosts. “It was bottom-up, I don’t know if you know that. That’s what I’ve been told to say.” Meantime, serious concerns about election integrity get dismissed as evidence of a right-wing conspiracy.
My opinion? Our elites are no longer interested in maintaining the appearances of democracy, relying on the news media staying silent as witting accomplices. An increasingly partisan civil service does not bode well. Though I must admit, the Democratic Party is the party of China, and the Republican Party is the party of Russia.
