The conservative Republican senator from Texas, up for reelection this cycle, likened the lawfare against President Donald J. Trump to Third World despotism in the Aug. 16 episode of his "The Verdict" podcast.

“A year ago, our nation had gone more than two centuries, and we'd never once had a former president or a current president, or a current leading candidate for president indicted," said Sen. Ted Cruz to his co-host Ben Ferguson.

“We just didn't do that. That was something banana republics did; that's something little tin pot dictatorships did,” the senator said.

Cruz said Democrats now treat it as routine to weaponize law enforcement and the judicial systems against their political opponents.

“It is remarkable that [in] the world we're living in now, apparently, political disagreements, at least when you're dealing with Democrats in power, are resolved by trying to indict, prosecute, drag through the mud, and put in jail your opponents,” the Texan said.

Later in the podcast, Cruz added, "We're literally facing a world where TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, is so bad Democrats have convinced themselves that Trump is the devil that they now want to put him in jail for sending tweets."

The senator said the Democrats driving cases against Trump also use the cases to manipulate the news cycles. 

Cruz is not just speculating. He is a graduate of Harvard Law and then clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Back home in Texas, he served as the Texas Solicitor General before returning to Washington as a senior official in President George W. Bush's Justice Department. 

“I think it's absolutely ridiculous, and it is sadly predictable,” he said.

“Like clockwork, every time bad news comes out about Joe Biden or Hunter Biden, every time additional evidence comes out of corruption on the on the part of Joe Biden, within hours, a new Trump indictment drops,” he said. 

The most recent indictment against Trump, and 18 other co-defendants, was dropped shortly before midnight on Aug. 14 by a Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury under the supervision of District Attorney Fani T. Willis. 

Willis’ innovation was to charge Trump and the others under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization laws, meaning that simple and legal acts, such as sending an email or making a phone call, become illegal acts if they are in the furtherance of the criminal enterprise, which is what Willis is calling the effort to resolve the irregularities in Georgia’s 2020 election.

Cruz said using RICO laws, created to prosecute mobsters, drug dealers, and terrorists, against political opponents is a dangerous turn for a democracy.

One of the co-defendants named by the grand jury is David Shafer, who was the head of the Republican Party in Georgia. 

Cruz said additionally, Willis is folding in lawyers, a provocative step that threatens the right to counsel.

“It includes a bunch of Trump's lawyers and includes Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell; it also includes Jeffrey Clark, who was a senior Department of Justice official,” he said. 

“Virtually all of the lead lawyers for Donald Trump are now being prosecuted, and it seems their principal crime was daring to represent Donald Trump,” he said. 

The senator said he had been critical of mistakes made by Trump's lawyers and that many of the problems the president and his legal team are dealing with now could have been avoided. 

“In particular, when it comes to litigating the election fraud cases across the country, they did not do a very good job laying out the evidence, litigating those cases, and litigating them to victory,” he said. 

Cruz said he does not think a lawyer’s mistakes make him a criminal.

“There's a difference between not doing a tremendously effective job in court, which, sadly, is not that uncommon,” he said, "and being told that because you represented the president of the other party, the prosecutors are going to try to lock you up, gonna try to put you in jail." 

“I think this is disgraceful. It is nakedly political.”