The 2024 election was an historical race that will likely be studied by historians and political scientists for decades to come. It saw a former president rebound after losing his first bid to serve a second term in the White House, an outcome that has only happened once — when Grover Cleveland came back to snatch the presidency back from Benjamin Harrison after being defeated by him previously.
But there was something else that makes this particular race unique: the fact that a political party weaponized the legal system to influence the outcome of the election – and then lost.
In a guest essay for The New York Times, author Samuel Moyn noted how folks on the left failed in their effort to use the courts and politically motivated prosecutions to make President-elect Donald Trump too toxic to support at the ballot box.
Moyn detailed how the efforts to attack Trump through the courts not only failed to weaken him, but made him stronger by galvanizing his supporters. “In this election, legalistic tactics contributed to Mr. Trump’s victory, helping to produce the popular majority he had never boasted before,” he wrote, also pointing out that the criminal investigations “breathed new life into his campaign fund-raising.”
“The politics of law had misdirected their focus for years, and in the process convinced millions of Americans that Mr. Trump’s foes were as prone to conspiratorial thinking as his allies. Cries that Mr. Trump’s opponents were engaged in ‘lawfare’ suddenly gained credibility.”
The author then made a compelling point: “The election became something like national jury nullification – after the fact for the New York case, and pre-emptively for the others.”
Trump managed to use a form of political judo during the campaign that “transformed these criminal charges into political opportunities and essentially bet the farm on the outcome of the election,” according to Moyn.
The author suggested that in the future, Democrats must pivot away from relying on legal stunts to oppose Trump and other Republicans and instead try to persuade the public to embrace their ideology. “If his victory does not lead liberals to reorient their opposition away from the courts, there will be no way past the numb feelings of inevitability with which many have greeted his 2024 breakthrough,” Moyn observed.
If Democrats were smart, they would listen to Moyn. In fact, if they were politically savvy, they would have known better than to try to weaponize the justice system against a political opponent – especially one like Trump, who excels at using his enemies’ attacks to his advantage.
To those who are not on the left, it was obvious how these prosecutorial efforts would play out because they understand Trump’s strengths. From the moment Democrats began trying to use a provision in the 14th Amendment to disqualify the president-elect from the ballot, we knew that they were desperate.
They were literally willing to abandon their fake concerns over “democracy” by summarily removing a candidate from the race instead of letting the voters decide. This was never going to go over well with anyone except Democratic voters.
In using the law in this manner, they gave Trump one of his greatest weapons. The mug shot he took after being indicted by Fulton County, Georgia, was not the humiliation Democrats hoped it would be. Instead, it became a symbol illustrating the lengths to which the left will go to vanquish their enemies.
The reason why using the law to defeat Trump turned off voters is because, at least on some level, most people understand that the law was meant to protect our rights, not win elections or attack political opponents. Nobody likes a bully, and the government has often been the biggest bully in the nation. Democrats believed that since they controlled this bully, they could use it to achieve success, which might go down as one of the most ill-advised gambits in American electoral history.
It is also important to mention how the use of lawfare to defeat Trump showed that Democrats knew they could not make a convincing enough case to elect their candidate. They knew there was a high probability that their candidate would not win, so they used the legal system to try to disqualify Trump and ensure he was labeled as a “convicted felon,” a term Democrats have come to favor over the past year.
It was an utter disaster for the Democrats and would have been a bigger catastrophe for the entire nation had the plan worked and Harris won the election. It would have set the precedent that weaponizing government against political candidates is a winning strategy. The slippery slope is evident: If we can use the government against politicians, why not use it against their supporters as well?
