Donald Trump Is Not the Victim of ‘Lawfare.’ He’s a Crook.

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/donald-trump-is-not-the-victim-of-lawfare-he-s-a-crook/ar-BB1kCiOz?

One of the reasons Republicans were so reluctant to accept Donald Trump’s nomination in 2016 is that he was quite obviously a crook. “His business record reflects the often dubious norms of the milieu: using eminent domain to condemn the property of others; buying the good graces of politicians — including many Democrats — with donations,” editorialized National Review. Marco Rubio lambasted him as a “con artist.” The Wall Street Journal editorialized about Trump’s deep ties to the mafia and his fulsome praise of its work. (After Trump won the nomination, the Journal spiked a second editorial about his mob links.)

“Lawfare” means using the law as a weapon to get Trump. Conservatives ranging from the Trumpiest wing of the movement to the most Trump-skeptical — the ones who used to attack him as a crook — have all employed this term to describe the entire range of Trump’s legal problems, from his New York fraud conviction to his indictments in New York and Atlanta to both of Jack Smith’s federal cases.

The advantage of this catchall term is that it allows Trump’s defenders to ignore the specifics of Trump’s misconduct, or at least to analyze it in a highly selective way. There are indeed a couple instances in which Trump has faced legal challenges that are questionable (the attempt to disqualify him from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment) or downright weak (Alvin Bragg’s indictment over hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels). Conservatives tend to focus obsessively on these cases, and “lawfare” is a permission structure that allows them to use these cases to ignore or discredit the others, where Trump’s behavior is impossible to defend.