The district attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, received over $1 million dollars in campaign donations from George Soros to help him massively outspend his opponents and win his election to the post. Bragg has proceeded to adopt the core tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement and treat violent crimes as social justice issues. In 2022 Bragg reduced just over half of all felony charges to misdemeanour ones. The violent crime and murder rates in New York City have gone up precipitously. For instance, there is the case of a man with 36 prior convictions who robbed a drug store at knifepoint and had his grand larceny charge reduced to a misdedeamour. He later assaulted a woman on the street. Ditto another man who’d committed an antisemitic assault in Times Square. His felony charge was also reduced to a misdeamour. The examples are myriad. This is a district attorney who’s something of an alchemist in turning serious felony charges into non-serious misdemeanour charges (where the accused gets a slap on the wrist, if that).

But by all accounts Mr Bragg has seen the light and has decided, at last, to come down hard on crime. In what may be a first for this DA, Bragg looks likely to elevate a five-year-old misdemeanour charge (never in fact charged) to a felony charge. And this is in a case where the Department of Justice and the Feds generally (back in 2018) looked at the facts and refused to prosecute at all.  So who could this villain be, we all wonder, to provoke this Damascene conversion in Herr Bragg? Well, if you guessed former president Donald Trump you win. By the time you read this Mr Trump may already have been indicted and arrested. Wherever you are on the political spectrum this is a disgrace. In no democracy do things work out well when the justice system is politicised and political opponents targeted and charged. To say it’s third world stuff is to be unkind to the third world.

We are seeing the ruling party, the Democrats, using police power to arrest its political opponents to get them out of the way. Look, left-wing but brutally honest US law professor Jonathan Turley says this ‘case would be easily dismissed outside a jurisdiction like New York, where Bragg can count on highly motivated judges and jurors’ [the numbers who vote Republican in New York City being miniscule]. Turley continues ‘although it may be politically popular, the case is legally pathetic. [The DA] is struggling to twist state laws to effectively prosecute a federal case long ago rejected by the Justice Department against Trump over his payment of “hush money” to a former stripper Stormy Daniels’. Remember, it’s only illegal if the motivation for paying the money was ‘for election purposes’ not protecting one’s reputation. Recall, too, that Bill Clinton handed over way more hush money to women to silence what were in fact rape allegations by them. Did the Republicans weaponise those payments? (And for what it’s worth the highest-paid quarterback in the NFL, under contract for a guaranteed quarter of a billion dollars, paid huge money to 25 different masseuses who all alleged he insisted on ‘happy endings’ to the point the insistence scared them witless. No charges by this or any other DA.) Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry made technical legal errors around campaign finance rules. The Republicans did not weaponise those. Hillary Clinton used a private email server while in Obama’s cabinet. That was a far more serious misdeed than anything yet mentioned. Then President – who was it again? oh ya – Trump was against her being charged (not that the bureaucrats probably would have anyway).

This indictment of Trump is flat-out politics and very dangerous politics at that. Yes, I know some people have basically lost their minds when it comes to Trump but if Jonathan Turley can see how bad this politicising of the criminal law is then they can too. First off, once you let Pandora open this box it is no easy task to shut it ever again. If the Dems do this and throw all democratic norms out the window then the only effective response is to do likewise back to them (because game theory and evolution both tell us that the only winning strategy involves reciprocity, as in play nice to them until they don’t to you and then give it back to them with plenty of interest.) I know that conservative politicians here and in Britain are congenitally unable to fight back on any front, ever.  But a few Republicans in the US still have some fight in them. They’ll be thinking ‘if they get one of their district attorneys to arrest our guy then we’ll get one of ours to arrest theirs’. And if you don’t think there is enough dirty laundry to arrest Joe Biden in a post-2024 world with a Republican president then you’ve been living in a cave these past three years (or, more likely, you get your news from the massively partisan and left-leaning ABC).

Trust me readers, this is a bad development. It is banana republic stuff to go down the path of capturing power and then using all the levers of power to harass, intimidate and imprison opponents. To be perfectly blunt, my view is that the Biden Department of Justice was all set to go after Trump on a bogus classified documents charge until it was discovered that Joe Biden had taken more such documents than Trump and he’d taken them as vice president (where only a president can, under the constitution, declassify documents just by announcing he has, sort of undermining the Trump accusations anyway).

And they wanted to get Trump for 6 January until the released tapes showed that charges of insurrection were a bad joke – this was a mild riot with idiots entering the Capitol, some invited in and escorted around and not one having a gun. So those avenues having failed some top Dems seem to have handed matters over to DA Bragg to distance themselves. Democrat lawyer Jonathan Turley can see this. So can I.

Next question: Will this arrest hurt or help Trump? My take is that it in fact helps him politically. It makes him a martyr.  Wavering Republicans will be forced back into supporting him. I thought before this that Trump was the big favourite to win the Republican nomination. This sort of third world stuff forces the only serious Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis, into Trump’s corner.

It’s a sickening development. And speaking of that, what can you say about a NSW Liberal government that took debt from $8 billion up to some $100 billion? One whose premier opted to miss George Pell’s funeral?  A premier and government that has come out in support of the woeful Voice proposal? One whose energy policies are seemingly drafted on Matt Kean’s kitchen table? In NSW you have optional preferential voting. Voters can, say, vote for Mark Latham’s One Nation and the LibDems and then stop numbering their ballot. You don’t need to choose between the Libs and Labor because deciding which one is more left-wing is basically impossible.

Voting for Dominic Perrottet requires a stronger stomach and weaker gag reflex than I’ve got.