They’re not even trying to hide it anymore.
After a week where the polls didn’t give the Biden-Harris ticket the bump Democrats were hoping for, Vice President Kamala Harris escalated her criticism of presumptive GOP presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump on Saturday, arguing his conviction on 34 questionable felony counts in a Manhattan court ought to be “disqualifying.”
The speech, given at a Democratic Party dinner Saturday in Detroit, gave Harris the opportunity to up the rhetoric over what she termed Trump’s “attacks” on the justice system, according to Politico.
“You know why he complains? Because the reality is, cheaters don’t like getting caught,” Harris said in a copy of the speech Politico reviewed in advance.
Politico noted that the vice president, “who has long highlighted her prosecutorial record and service as California attorney general on the campaign trail, outlines in the remarks how a jury made a unanimous decision to convict the former president on 34 counts of falsifying business records.”
“She notes that Trump’s defense was able to participate in selecting both jurors and witnesses, in a rebuke of his allegations that he was not treated fairly.”
“Simply put, Donald Trump thinks he is above the law,” Harris said during the speech.
“This should be disqualifying for anyone who wants to be president of the United States.”
And, as for conservative allegations that the Biden administration had been tacitly trying to influence the outcome, Harris called these “lies.”
Since we can expect to hear this a lot over the next few months, we should probably go over exactly why this is arrant bunkum.
First, defendants who believe they were unjustly convicted have every right to speak out against the conviction. In this case, it was a politicized case that could have been brought any time over the past few years but — and here’s a surprise — just so happened to take place during the heat of the presidential season. No coincidence whatsoever.
And yet, the Biden administration continues to insist that Trump and his allies accept the Manhattan kangaroo court verdict, saying Trump only taking issue with it because “cheaters don’t like getting caught.” These are the kinds of things that happen in dictatorships and kakistocracies that are nominally democratic — not in the United States of America.
As for the fairness of the trial, yes, Trump’s attorneys were afforded the same rights as any other defendant — I mean, except for an openly politicized prosecution only identifying what a large part of the alleged crime actually was during the closing stretch of the trial, the openly biased judge instructing the jury that its members didn’t even need to agree on which crime Trump allegedly committed to find him guilty, and the fact that the venue was one of the most virulently anti-Trump, anti-Republican jurisdictions in the country.
But other than that …
Meanwhile, as for whether the Biden administration had any involvement in this, we haven’t had a proper explanation as to why a Department of Justice official under Biden joined Bragg’s prosecution team straight from the DOJ. Or why the White House held a rally near the courtroom with actor Robert De Niro as a surrogate.
Then, as for this being “disqualifying,” apparently Kamala’s expertise is in prosecution, not the Constitution. There’s nothing disqualifying about being found guilty of a felony, particularly if there are solid grounds for appeal, if one wants to run for president. Most famously, socialist Eugene Debs ran for president from prison in 1920, and took home a not-insignificant 4 percent.
This is a feature, not a bug, from our Founders: They realized the possibility of kneecapping the political opposition via political prosecutions. In retrospect, we should probably be shocked it took over 200 years for an administration to work up the gumption to actually do it.
Now, as for why Kamala is banging on about how the verdict was “disqualifying,” she — and everyone else in the White House — has seen the first wave of post-conviction polling, and it’s not looking good for the ticket — in fact, it’s looking like a disaster.
Particularly worrisome for Team Biden is a pair of polls out of Nevada and Virginia, two marginally swing states that tend to go Democrat in presidetial elections. In the Fox News polls, Trump was up in Nevada by five points and the two were tied in Virginia.
In both cases, the polls were taken after the guilty verdict was handed down in Manhattan. And they underscore just how.
You can guess why the lies are coming like an Obama-era gun-walking program: Fast and furious.
All of the vice president’s rhetoric, in other words, is ringing hollow for anyone who isn’t among the faithful. For the rest of us, this has been a giant waste of time, resources and democratic credibility.
But by this point, she doesn’t have much else. That’s what should be disqualifying.