Even before Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Democrats were frantic to defeat him and turned to the FBI to cook up a “Russian collusion” frame-up and slander campaign. When that failed, Democratic Party-led congressional committees and special prosecutors joined their FBI allies in congressional impeachments and other attacks to try to drive him out of office.
Over the last year Justice Department prosecutors and local Democratic district attorneys in New York and Georgia have filed several criminal and civil lawsuits against Trump aimed at crippling his family’s business, throwing him in jail and rigging the 2024 election for Joseph Biden.
At the same time, Trump has won the five Republican primaries so far, including South Carolina by a big majority Feb. 24. He is virtually assured of winning the Republican nomination. The Democrats — lacking confidence that Biden can win in November — are determined to use the courts to try to crush Trump. Some of these cases are now coming to trial.
New York Judge Arthur Engoron hit the Republican front-runner with an unprecedented $355 million fine, after ruling him guilty of business fraud before the trial had even begun! Engoron said prosecutors didn’t have to prove Trump actually deceived anyone, nor that Trump’s “fraud” had caused anyone to suffer a loss. All they had to do was show he had “the capacity or tendency to deceive.” But, as all workers know, under the dog-eat-dog capitalist system, every boss and landlord lives by a “tendency to deception.”
Engoron denied Trump’s request Feb. 22 for a 30-day delay in paying the fine. A day later a further $99 million in interest was slapped onto the judgment. Trump filed a notice of appeal Feb. 26. He now has until March 25 to secure a stay from the appeals court, which would prevent him from having to pay out the massive judgment, or receive any automatic stay by putting up cash or assets. On top of all this, Engoron banned Trump from seeking loans from any financial institution chartered in New York for three years.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the charges, says she’s ready and waiting to seize Trump’s properties. “I look at 40 Wall Street each and every day,” she told ABC News. When she ran for office in 2018, James made it clear her top priority would be to get Trump. In her victory speech she vowed she would be “shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings.”
After her election, James sued the then-president’s charitable Trump Foundation on charges of “misusing donations,” forcing him to shut it down. Then she set her sights on the current frame-up.
After the South Carolina primary, the “Never-Trump” Wall Street Journal editors condemned the former president for “dividing” Republicans and urged Nikki Haley, who has lost every primary to Trump by large margins, to continue fighting.
The Journal also ran a column by New York Law School professor Steven Cohen saying, “Many of us are delighted to see Mr. Trump get his comeuppance” in Engoron’s ruling. He praised James for “a novel and effective use of an existing statute.”
But there was nothing “novel” about James’ use of the courts to try to ruin Trump. This trial was one more step in a yearslong political vendetta, with dangerous precedents for the working class.
“Under conditions of the bourgeois regime, all suppression of political rights and freedom, no matter whom they are directed against in the beginning,” Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky said in 1939, “in the end inevitably bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements. That is a law of history.”
Democrats use courts against their own
At the same time that Democrats are seeking to destroy Trump, they’re trying to figure out what to do about their own candidate, Joseph Biden, whose poll numbers have hit rock bottom. Selecting another candidate could “fracture the Democratic coalition,” and still not guarantee Trump is defeated, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote Feb. 24.
And the socialist wing of the Democratic Party is pressuring Biden to cave into some of its politics — especially back-handed support to the murderous Jew-hating Hamas thugs in Gaza. Their call for a protest vote against Biden in the party’s Feb. 27 Michigan primary netted only 13.3% of the vote.
In their own factional attack, Democratic leaders in New York are using the State Board of Elections and campaign finance laws to go after the Democratic Socialists of America. Democratic-appointee Michael L. Johnson, the board’s “watchdog,” is demanding an Albany court order the DSA to pay $300,000 in penalties for violating “financial transparency.”
Neither the Democratic nor the Republican parties are concerned that in the course of their factional battles, basic constitutional protections are undermined. It is workers who resist the bosses’ profit-driven attacks who have most at stake in defending these freedoms and who must be in the forefront safeguarding them.