The president needed the debate — which effectively ended his campaign — because lawfare wasn’t able to keep the national spotlight on his opponent.
My column this weekend is the first of two parts on the collapse of the Democrats’ lawfare strategy. With President Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he is withdrawing from the 2024 race, it’s worth emphasizing that Democrats and their praetorian press have been well aware of Biden’s senescence since the start of his term. The Democrats’ 2024 strategy was to hide it, through lawfare. It was an adaptation of their 2020 campaign strategy: Capitalize on the pandemic by keeping the elderly and already declining Biden in his basement and make the election entirely about Trump.
Remember, lawfare was a coordinated, extensive strategy involving prosecutors who, starting in mid 2023, filed four elaborate criminal indictments, lodging a total of more than 90 felony charges. They immediately began pressuring judges to schedule trials that, they hoped, would start in March 2024 and run through the summer and even into the autumn — i.e., through the decisive stretch of the campaign.
Add to that the gambit by New York attorney general Letitia James. An elected Democrat, like lawfare district attorneys Alvin Bragg in Manhattan and Fani Willis in Fulton County, Ga., James civilly sued the former president and current Republican presidential nominee in a case existentially threatening Trump’s business empire — James filed the suit in autumn 2022 and then pushed hard for a late 2023 trial, lightning speed in New York civil practice, where parties commonly wait years for their trials to start.
The lawsuits, the timing of their commencement (which is always in the prosecutors’ control), and the drive to schedule trials in accordance with the campaign calendar rather than the due process of law were no accident. The point was not just to destroy Trump’s candidacy; it was to produce a historic, monthslong drama that would keep Biden and his deterioration out of the public eye.
I write in Saturday’s column:
By now, lawfare was supposed to have made Trump a certain loser, despite Biden’s immense negatives. It’s worth reviewing how and why it failed. That is especially so because, reportedly, the president is giving serious consideration to dropping out of the race — under intense pressure from anxious Democrats. He and they never expected to be in this position. Not because Biden’s deterioration had gone unnoticed, but because lawfare was the gambit that, by now, would have the public riveted to and disgusted by what Democrats surmised would be Trump’s proven, disqualifying criminality. Lawfare’s collapse left Trump relatively unscathed, even buoyed, and the public-attention void has been filled by scrutiny of Biden’s alarming physical and mental decline. That is likely to cost the president the election, if it doesn’t force his withdrawal from contention in the coming days.
I’ll return to this theme in part two of the series, which we’ll publish in the coming days. Lawfare was not just an afterthought. Democrats knew how weak their candidate was. Indictment after indictment, trial after trial, conviction after conviction — they were banking on these dramatic lawfare episodes to deflect attention from the president.
If lawfare hadn’t collapsed, the June debate that we now see as the death knell of Biden’s reelection bid would never have happened. By the time the debate was scheduled, it was Biden, not Trump, who needed it. The Biden Justice Department’s federal trials of Trump on very serious charges had not materialized, the Georgia case had descended into total farce over Willis’s personal scandal, and the face of lawfare had become Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan prosecution, which is widely seen as a travesty that may actually have boosted Trump (particularly after the aforementioned civil trial, in which Arthur Engoron, an unabashed partisan Democratic judge, imposed a ludicrous half-billion-dollar judgment against Trump in a fraud case with no fraud victims).
With Trump relatively unscathed and not tethered to courtrooms, public attention shifted from the lawfare prosecutions to Biden’s deteriorating condition and abysmal record. His candidacy couldn’t survive it.