There is, if one takes a charitable view, a sort of old-fashioned frontier spirit in Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of former President Donald Trump. The Manhattan district attorney’s gross overreach has pushed the nation into previously unmapped territory. Sadly, it may be an “undiscovered country from whose bourn no functioning republic returns,” as the great political commentator, Prince Hamlet, might have warned us.

By removing restraints against political prosecution, Bragg has elevated the rule of petty potentates over the rule of law. This can do nothing but harm. There are still three more cases pending against Trump, the nature, timing, and conduct of which, in various degrees, have already revealed deceitful political calculation that fair-minded voters can see. Whether those voters punish or reward Trump remains to be seen. But either way, efforts by one party to inconvenience rival politicians with jail time can be expected again. It would be a miracle if that were not to happen, for what goes around comes around.

Startling though the unprecedented conviction of a former president is, and jarring though the court proceedings were in their details, it is no surprise that Bragg twisted the law with pretzel logic to make his case. That’s because twisting the law is his modus operandi. It’s what he does with all cases under his jurisdiction.

For reasons of political and racial partisanship, rather than law and order, he converted Trump’s misdemeanors into felonies. But as a prosecutor, he has, again for political and racial reasons, shielded the majority of ne’er-do-wells from serious punishment by converting 60% of felony crimes into misdemeanors. Career criminals don’t fear arrest and unpleasant consequences because they’ll be released and back on the street before you can say, “Help, police! There goes my wallet!” 

Eight years ago, Trump boasted that he was so popular he could get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, which runs north-south through the core of the Big Apple. But now one has to ask, who couldn’t make the same boast these days? With Bragg letting so many people off for their crimes, the former president is maybe the only New Yorker who’d get into trouble for his bruited Fifth Avenue outrage.

The point is that although the trial and conviction of Trump for shoddy bookkeeping create a dangerous precedent, the principle of distorted political justice was already long established by Bragg. He is supported by the radical left-wing billionaire George Soros, who is financing massive upheaval all over the country. That’s because Bragg is the perfect exponent of politics that corrupts the unbiased administration of justice.

There is, of course, political content to laws. They are passed by political legislators elected by voters. But those laws, decided by the people’s representatives, are supposed then to be administered as written and broadly understood. A pattern of decisions by Bragg and other Soros prosecutors to ignore the wishes of the people’s representatives is a usurpation of power. The prosecution of Trump was much the biggest case to draw attention to it, but the principle of impartially administered justices had already been trashed.

In the wake of Trump’s conviction, Democrats and their media handmaidens have adopted an absurd line of argument to mock and rebut conservative and Republican outrage. CNN’s ineffable Wolf Blitzer, interviewing Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) last week, asked, “What happened to the Republican Party being the party of law and order?”

Blitzer’s implication is that anyone keen to be known for the respect of law and order should reflexively approve of a conviction. If you’re for law and order, his underlying assumption is that you want courts to throw the book at defendants.

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The obvious answer is, “No, Wolf, a law-and-order party wants laws applied equally so our society and democracy are orderly. It objects to the trial of Trump precisely because the GOP is a party that cares about law and order. The case was a disgraceful stretch by Bragg and should never have been brought. It was compounded by highly questionable rules of evidence and jury directions from the judge of which a law-and-order party should equally disapprove.”

Deprecation of the Trump trial and verdict does not have anything necessarily to do with support of the former president. It is not just Trump fans such as Vance who are outraged. So, too, are Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Susan Collins (R-ME), who have long made it plain that they would prefer their party to have someone different as its leader. They and many others show that there is reason for grave concern on grounds of principle, not partisanship.