Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Everyone knows the felony charges against Donald Trump for paying hush-money to a porn star are ridiculous.

Everyone knows that charging Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records was just a slimy political stunt by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Everyone knows that Bragg’s legally dubious indictment is just the latest desperate attempt by Democrats to prevent Trump from running for president in 2024.

And, along with a handful of honest Democrats and liberal media pundits, even diehard Trump-hater Mitt Romney admits that Bragg’s “overreach sets a dangerous precedent for criminalizing political opponents and damages the public’s faith in our justice system.”

But Bragg and the Democrats are not only making a laughing stock out of our judicial system.

They are also making our visibly shaky and untrustworthy electoral system look like something you’d see in a corrupt banana republic or communist dictatorship.

You’d think they and their disreputable cheerleaders in the news media would have bigger things to worry about than hounding Trump in court over fake crimes from seven years ago.

For starters, how about securing the southern border they’ve flung wide open to illegal immigrants, human traffickers and deadly drugs?

How about fighting the inflation they’ve caused with their policies? Or doing something to fight the crime, violence and squalor that they have allowed to turn the downtowns of some of our greatest cities into hellholes?

Instead Bragg and the Democrats are charging the ex-president of the United States over a non-disclosure agreement he signed in 2016 with Stormy Daniels.

NDAs are part of the American corporate and political woodwork.

CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CBS, PBS and hundreds of other business and government places have no doubt used NDAs and six-figure payouts to quietly settle sexual harassment and racial discrimination claims.

And remember the Office of Compliance?

Congress secretly created it in the 1990s to pay off and quietly shut up people who charged they had been sexually harassed or discriminated against by members of Congress.

That embarrassing office is never on the media’s radar, but it’s still open for business. As of 2017, when its existence was made public, it had paid more than 230 victims $17 million – of taxpayers’ money.

At least Trump paid Daniels with his own money. But that doesn’t matter. Whatever he does is always declared a special crime, according to his enemies, though he’s never been convicted of anything.

I’m no big fan of Trump. But for him to get a fair trial in New York City, where judges are elected and 80 percent of the people voted for Biden, won’t be possible.

Convicting him will also be impossible. Bragg’s case will be thrown out by the first honest appellate judge that looks at it.

Bragg has to know that, but he and the Democrats don’t care. They’re not looking for justice, just political points, and they’ve already scored them by cheating.

Arresting the leading contender for president on trumped up charges may backfire politically for the Democrats in 2024, but what they did this week was a shot that will be heard in capitals around the world for a long time.

For almost a century we’ve been the country that criticizes foreign governments for doing things like throwing their political opponents in jail and not running fair and free elections.

Now countries half as free as us are telling us we no longer have the right to lecture them about democracy.

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, said from now on it’s going to be very hard for the U.S. “to condemn ‘political persecution’ in other countries” – and he’s right.

That’s why this dirty Democrat game really tees me off.

What they did this week took the United States to the lowest level it’s been in my lifetime.

We watched my father’s “Shining City on the Hill” get blown up and hurt badly by a partisan road-side bomb – and that IED was set off by Bragg and the Democrats.

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Copyright 2023 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.