Trumped Up

In his Nobel Prize winning book, The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about how the leaders of the Soviet Union weaponized the judiciary against their political opponents – oftentimes, sending them to Siberian Gulags for the rest of their lives on spurious trumped-up charges. Most of the time, the charges against political prisoners were ambiguous ‘conspiracies’, ‘crimes against the state’, ‘suspicion of espionage’. And there was rarely just one charge. It was usually three or four charges levied against their political opponents. There were speech crimes, thought crimes and crimes of association. After experiencing life in the Soviet Gulags, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the old proverb does not lie: Look for the brave in prison, and the stupid among the political leaders!”

Yesterday, Donald Trump was indicted for the third time during an election season in which the polls have him as the frontrunner over the incumbent President, Joe Biden. And not coincidently, it is Biden’s DOJ that has indicted Trump twice. Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Donald J Trump has courage. The man is facing over one hundred years in federal prison, and not by an impartial judiciary, but by rabid partisans whose only goal is to use their vast power to see to it that Trump dies behind bars. And the surest way for Donald Trump to avoid that fate is to drop out of the Presidential election for if he does, these indictments will surely go away and be forgotten. But Trump fights on. He is not fighting for his over-inflated ego. He’s already a billionaire. He already has the President of the United States skin on his wall. He already received 74 million votes, the most legal votes by any candidate in our history.