Despite Trump’s Caustic Criticism the Nation’s Legal System May Be His Best Hope for a Second Term

by johndavis, February 29, 2024

Despite Trump’s Caustic Criticism the Nation’s Legal System May Be His Best Hope for a Second Term February 29, 2024 Vol. XVII, No. 2 9:13 pm Running Against “The System” is Right Out of Trump’s 2016 Playbook Next Tuesday, March 5, 2024, former president Donald Trump will win North Carolina’s GOP presidential primary, as well
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Despite Trump’s Caustic Criticism the Nation’s Legal System May Be His Best Hope for a Second Term

February 29, 2024 Vol. XVII, No. 2 9:13 pm

Running Against “The System” is Right Out of Trump’s 2016 Playbook

Next Tuesday, March 5, 2024, former president Donald Trump will win North Carolina’s GOP presidential primary, as well as the presidential nomination contests in all other Super Tuesday states, including Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. He has already won Iowa with 51%, New Hampshire with 54%, South Carolina with 60%, and Michigan with 68% of the vote.

Trump is winning because MAGA Republicans, now the dominant GOP voting bloc, think he’s the best candidate to go to Washington and break a fixed system; a system they believe is rigged for insiders at the expense of the working class. It’s the same “rigged system” Trump railed against when he defeated insider Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Looking back to the March 15, 2016 GOP presidential primary in North Carolina, Donald Trump won with 40% in a 12-candidate field. He went on to defeat Hillary Clinton in the North Carolina General Election contest by 49.8% to 46.2%.

Great insight into Trump’s upset victory can be found in a July 2016 post by liberal activist Michael Moore titled Five Reasons Trump Will Win. Moore predicted Trump would win the presidential race, carrying the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, because of working class anger against “the system.” Appearing on Meet the Press, October 2, 2016, Moore said, “A lot of people are angry. And they see Donald Trump as their human Molotov cocktail that they get to go into the voting booth on November 8th and throw him into a political system that has made their lives miserable.”

Now, eight years later, Donald Trump is still winning presidential primaries and caucuses with his pitch that “the system” is corrupted against the interests of MAGA voters. Last week, on February 24, Trump spoke at the Black Conservative Federation’s annual gala, claiming that he, like Black Americans, had been discriminated against by the “legal system.”

“I’m being indicted for you, the American people. I’m being indicted for you, the Black population. I am being indicted for a lot of different groups by sick people, these are sick, sick people,” Trump said to the Black conservatives, referring to his 91 felony charges (44 federal charges and 47 state charges).

The Legal System is Likely Why Trump Will Either Stay or Go

The fact is, barring a health crisis, the legal system is the most likely reason Donald Trump will either get out or stay in the presidential race before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 15-18, 2024.

For instance, Trump may drop out of the presidential race due to a financial crisis, like a business decision to file for bankruptcy, resulting from millions in penalties owed, like the $454 million from the New York civil fraud verdict in February, and Jean Carroll’s $83 million defamation judgment.

But then, the legal system may also be the reason Trump is in a position to stay in the presidential race. He may win his appeal to have the “egregious fine” (his lawyer’s words) of $454 million deemed “excessive” and therefore unconstitutional under the 8^th Amendment to the US Constitution.

The legal system could also give Trump a favorable ruling in the attempts by state officials in Colorado, Maine and yesterday Illinois to have Trump disqualified from the state’s ballot based on their determination that he participated in an insurrection on January 6, 2021.

At the US Supreme Court hearing on February 8, liberal Justice Elena Kagan signaled a likely favorable decision for Trump when she raised the question, “What’s a state doing deciding who other citizens get to vote for for president?”

The legal system may derail the Georgia election fraud case if the Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is disqualified for lying about details of when her affair with special prosecutor Nathan Wade began. The case alleging that Trump and 14 others conspired to overthrow the 2020 presidential race may be postponed until after the November elections.

And the legal system may dismiss the criminal case charging Donald Trump with the mishandling of classified documents based on his claim of presidential immunity. Trump says he cannot be prosecuted for what amounted to an “official act” while serving as president. Presidential immunity is also a reason Trump insists that he cannot be prosecuted for anything he did or didn’t do leading up to and during the January 6 rioting at the US Capitol.

The legal system is why the United States has not merely survived our 248-year experiment in self-governance, it is why we continue to surmount obstacles to equal rights and universal fairness under the law for all Americans.

The legal system is the last great hope for American ideals

The legal system is the last great hope for American ideals, especially the ideal of equal protection under the law. One of the most celebrated landmark cases in the history of the nation’s highest court began when a high school dropout named Clarence Earl Gideon, who had lived a life of homelessness and larceny, wrote a petition to the US Supreme Court on prison letterhead with a pencil arguing that he was denied a constitutional right to counsel.

The landmark case, Gideon v. Wainwright, was a 9-0 ruling in 1963 that a poor defendant is entitled to representation in state court under the Sixth Amendment and that states could not deny them that right under the 14th Amendment.

But the constitutional ideal of equal protection under the law is for very wealthy Americans too, even foul-mouthed, narcissistic Americans like Trump who can afford to spend $76 million on attorney fees in the last two years, per a February 2, 2024 Associated Press analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.

Ironically, the very system that Trump decries as unfair is the system that is now his best hope for staying in the president race. His political and personal fortunes are now in the hands of a legal system that despite his degradation has stood the test of time.

Since the first meeting of the US Supreme Court in New York City on February 2, 1790, the court has overruled only 235 of its 30,863 decisions ending with the 2023 term. For emphasis: only .0076% of the US Supreme Court’s decisions have been overruled by a subsequent decision.

The integrity of the legal system of the United States is based on the fact that a billionaire former president with an MBA from Wharton like Donald John Trump will be treated no more or no less fairly than a penniless petty thief who dropped out of high school like Clarence Earl Gideon.

Despite Trump’s caustic criticism, the nation’s legal system may be his best hope for a second term.

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