According to America’s most celebrated living constitutional and criminal lawyer, Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, the criminal action against Donald Trump is the ‘worst abuse of prosecutorial discretion’ he has seen in sixty long years of legal practice.

Dershowitz, whose 2018 Australian lecture tour was inspiring, remains a Democrat who declares he’d never vote for Trump.

The action against Trump is only the latest example of increasing abuse of the American legal system, well described by former Texas solicitor general, Senator Ted Cruz, in his landmark study, Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System.

Cruz was my first preference as US presidential candidate in the 2016 election until he was pipped at the post for the Republican nomination by Donald Trump, at that time almost unknown to me.

Actually, the Republican establishment wanted neither Cruz nor Trump, but unlike Australian preselections, primaries are difficult, if not impossible, for powerbrokers to control. Run by the equivalent of electoral commissions, they are usually decided by  registered party supporters.

Once Trump’s agenda was announced at Gettysburg, it seemed obvious to me that the Republican rank and file had made a first-rate choice.

Incidentally, the first Australian I knew to not only support but predict Trump’s victory was the prominent Liberal Democrat, John Ruddick. He explains this, as well as his views on the coming presidential election, in a wide-ranging ADH.TV interview.

As both Dershowitz and Cruz point out, even people who should know better are celebrating because they think they are going to Get Trump. (That’s the name of Dershowitz’s latest book.)

Cruz warns that such extremes can backfire. As Elon Musk tweeted, ‘if you’re dumb enough to do this’, it will guarantee the presidency to Donald Trump.

In any event, neither a prosecution, nor even a conviction, can stop Trump from standing.

Only something unprecedented could.

The lawful way would be in a guilty finding against him, with a condition not to stand, imposed by the Senate in special session, presided over by the Chief Justice, all in a trial initiated by a House impeachment.

Cruz says an arrest will be seen by many Americans as similar to the way political enemies are treated in Third-World countries.

Dershowitz says it’s not even a misdemeanour. Lawyers, he says, do deals every day to settle cases. Nobody, he says, has ever been prosecuted for trying to hide the fact that he paid hush-up money to a prostitute. In this case, $130,000 was paid, through a now hostile lawyer, as ‘legal fees’.

The prosecution against Trump is being pushed by left-wing activist Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg. His election was funded by the far-left billionaire George Soros, who favours DAs who are extremely lenient to violent criminals.

Cruz points out that Hillary Clinton grossly mis-used the description ‘legal fees’ when, in the 2016 election, her campaign spent over a million dollars paying for the Steele Dossier, the ‘bogus fake Russiagate thing’ containing ‘false dirt’ to suggest Trump had colluded with the Russians to win the election. The Muller investigation found no evidence of any such collusion.

Mrs Clinton’s conduct was undoubtedly much more serious. This was to cover the fabrication of  fake evidence to justify an impeachment. Yet ironically, says Cruz, the very same Democrats and mainstream media who are celebrating ‘going after’ Trump were perfectly fine with a politicised FBI deciding something not within its remit, that Hillary Clinton should not face a criminal trial.

Given the way the US republic is heading, Turnbull and Keating’s republicans may well have seemed wise to reject the American model and propose clearly inferior versions to replace our crowned republic.

Not so. They equally reject the world’s other oldest and respected republic, Switzerland.

This is no doubt because Swiss politicians are under the control of the people in a way Australians can only dream of. That’s the last type of republic that local so-called republicans want. They want to increase the powers of the political class.

The problem with the US for Australian republicans is that these days the US citizenry can sometimes choose a president against the strong wishes of the party power brokers and their media allies, as they did with Trump.

And for many in the Australian mainstream media, it is also easier  to be involved in bringing down a prime minister than it is to bring down a US president.

Remember how many were supportive of, or even directly involved in replacing Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull, including the misuse of the late Prince Philip’s knighthood to advance this.

To the Australian political establishment being a republic is clearly not about improving governance. It is just about removing the Crown. It is no coincidence that all three models produced over the last three decades significantly increase the powers of the political class, a political class who have in so many ways failed in the challenge of providing good government.

On this it is interesting to hear the personal experience of the Liberal Democrat, John Ruddick.

In his ADH.TV interview, he reveals that growing up, he loved American history and thought the monarchy was an anachronism. Australia, he believed, needed to be like the US. All this changed in a second when he read that magnificent line, ‘The significance of the Crown is not the power it possesses, but the power it denies others.’

Ruddick says when he first read this the penny dropped. ‘That is absolutely right,’ he exclaimed. He tells Liberal Democrats: ‘Look, this is very libertarian, the constitutional monarchy, it’s about removing centralised power.’

He says it’s about devolving power, putting someone on the throne – the ‘deal’ is they sit there and they do nothing. That they get there by ‘something like birth’, means this cannot be contested. The result, he says, is we don’t have political egomaniacs in control who want to be dictators. An odd system, he says, but one backed by centuries of success.