Is it right for an officeholder to use the legal machinery to target opponents?  This is a serious question, and the pundits are right to suggest that what we now call “lawfare” establishes a dangerous precedent.  However, you don’t have to like Mr. Trump to believe that in his case, at least, the question has been misframed.

For are his opponents being targeted for opposing Mr. Trump, or for opposing him by illegal means?  After all, the precedent for lawfare had already been established – and established by them.  I don’t suggest that lawfare had never been used before during the history of the republic.  It has been, and by Republicans too:  Think of Richard Nixon’s plans for his enemies list, plans which were ultimately unsuccessful.  However, lawfare has now become the settled policy of the Left whenever they lose elections or are in danger of losing them.

In 2016, the instrumentalities of justice and national intelligence were spectacularly mobilized to concoct narratives of collusion between Mr. Trump and the Russians, narratives which were known to be false by the officials who promulgated them – if the term “spectacularly” can be used of something which was intended to be secret.  Those involved were, by the way, already quite experienced in this sort of thing.  When Mr. Trump won the election anyway, his opponents announced that they would do whatever it took to bring him down, even if they had to invent crimes for which to indict him.  All in the name of defending democracy.

This strategy was so crass and duplicitous that it provoked a popular revolt, catapulting Mr. Trump into a second term after the interregnum of Mr. Biden.  Even as weak a candidate as Mrs. Harris was, it is very possible that Mr. Trump would not have won his second term if lawfare hadn’t so obviously been waged against him.  Voters didn’t like it.

So the question should not be whether an officeholder should “target his opponents,” but whether he may seek punishment for actual crimes committed against him.  We don’t say that a mugging victim is “targeting his opponents” when he files charges against the muggers.  That’s not mere revenge; it is justice.

Needless to say, if you think some of Mr. Trump’s opponents haven’t perverted justice and violated his civil rights to bring him down, then by all means, protest their innocence.  Perhaps some of them really are innocent.  But don’t defend them just because they have been “targeted.”  In that overbroad sense, every convicted criminal has been “targeted.”

A plausible argument can be made that even if injustice was done to Mr. Trump, maybe he should turn the other cheek.  After all, in a political climate as heated as ours, even indicting people for real crimes is made to look like mere retaliation – isn’t that exactly how the legacy media portray it?  Mr. Trump’s careless rhetoric doesn’t help, because it often feeds into that way of telling the story.  So even though indicting offenders for crimes isn’t the same thing as waging lawfare, couldn’t it deepen the precedent of waging lawfare anyway?

But that reasoning is perverse too.  Habitual criminals always think they are victims, and some people always sympathize with them.  Consider again the fellow who was mugged.  Should we say that he should turn the other cheek, because filing charges would make people think that his muggers had been victimized?  Or that filing charges would provoke them to mug again in retaliation, “deepening the precedent” of mugging?  Of course not.  If they mug again, punish them again, and this time make the punishment more memorable.

The question that not enough people are asking is this:  What if those who subverted our system of justice just to “get” Mr. Trump aren’t prosecuted?  What if they don’t face any consequences for violating his civil rights, not to mention those of many others?

The context of Jesus’ widely quoted remark about turning the other cheek shows that He was speaking of insult, not injury:  Of having one side of one’s face slapped with a palm, not of having one side of the throat sliced open with a knife.  Is it really plausible that letting crooked officials who have done and attempted real crimes off the hook would cool things down – that they would go and sin no more?

No.  They, and those who think like them, would say, "Okay, lawfare didn't work the way we planned the first time around, or the second or third, but it came pretty close, and we didn't pay a price for trying it.  Let's try it again.  In fact, let’s double down this time."

In fact, they are already saying that.  Shouldn’t we take them at their word?

Reminder:

My new book, Pandemic of Lunacy:  How to Think

Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy, will

be released in February and can be pre-ordered now.