Here’s a question for readers of this wonderful weekly. The US has a population of somewhere around 330 to 335 million people. So take that entire population and let us speculate as regards this question: ‘What is the sample size or number of people who meet the following test – until the age of 75 they have never been charged with any criminal offence and certainly no serious indictable offences. Nothing at all. And then, after they turn 75 years old, they later get charged in four distinct US jurisdictions, in separate cases, that allege different and distinct indictable offences in all those places?’. So I’m not asking about the odd octogenarian charged out of the blue with murdering his spouse. Nor am I talking about the sort of private law civil litigation your Clive Palmers and other magnates and tycoons undertake. I’m asking about someone who has never in his life up to the age of 75 been thought ever to commit any sort of criminal offence but then, not long before he turns 80, he is alleged under four separately led prosecutions, in separate American jurisdictions, to have committed four broadly distinct major, non-murder crimes, each of those four itself involving multiple and myriad indictable offences. What, I’m asking, do you think are the number of Americans out of that 330-million-person pool, who would fall into that broad category – of being law-abiding until they are older than 75 and then, allegedly, they become one of the biggest criminals in the country? My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that the sample size of Americans who meet those criteria is just one person, namely former president Donald Trump. I doubt there is another American that falls into that category, now or ever.  But again, that’s just speculation on my part.

What we can all observe, though, is that when the criminal justice system of a country does, in this way, single out the leading opposition figure and candidate at the upcoming national election there are certainly some unpleasant similarities with the actions of a good few authoritarian regimes around the world these past 70 or 80 years, regimes that have been known to weaponise the justice system against political opponents.

Add in the fact that in two of the four of these cases against Mr Trump – the two state-level ones – the district attorneys bringing the cases were in noticeable part funded by George Soros and other hard-left Democrats and that they came into office as district attorneys on a promise ‘to get Trump’ somehow, some way; and the fact that in all four cases rather novel legal theories are being used by the prosecution; and that one of the four cases is being brought in a US jurisdiction that voted 87 per cent Democrat at the last presidential election and another in a jurisdiction that voted 93 per cent Democrat, making the jury pools in those two places rather, shall we say, favourable to the prosecutors; and that in some or all of these cases Democrat politicians have done exactly the same or indeed a good deal worse than what Mr Trump is alleged to have done – for instance, as just one example of supposedly falsely saying payments were for legal fees and expenses (the alleged Trump crime in New York city), Hillary Clinton’s campaign camouflaged its payments for the fake Fusion GPS Trump dossier as payments to its law firm Perkins Coie. One key difference – other than the fact that Hillary was never charged but Trump was – is that Hillary’s situation was much worse as the payments were actually made by her campaign, not by her personally, whereas Trump had paid personally. That makes Hillary’s false filing with the FEC a campaign violation but not Trump’s.  Moreover, Trump’s ‘hush money’ payments to Stormy Daniels were perfectly legal. (Bill Clinton made more than a few of them over the years as have myriad others in politics, Hollywood, business, etc.)

On top of that, supposedly filing a false corporate document where there is no FEC violation is just a misdemeanour – pay a few thousand dollars and go away. Worse, the statute of limitations passed on this misdemeanour years ago. Hence the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg could only charge Mr Trump with an indictable offence if he alleged that the supposedly false documents were filed in order to cover up some other crime. Only that would make it a felony. But what other crime? DA Bragg has never explicitly said because, to be blunt, there is no other crime absent the most stretched, elastic and novel of legal theories; ones that have never been used or tried out on any accused ever before in a US courtroom.

Meanwhile, as regards the Florida documents case, President Biden took and kept far more classified government documents, albeit that he kept them more disparately housed and far less protected than Mr Trump’s were at Mar-a-Lago and Biden’s were taken from the time when he was vice-president and so Mr Biden had no legal authority whatsoever to declassify them at will as only presidents have that authority.  But as we know, Mr Biden was deemed not sufficiently cognisant or apprised or aware or, heck, sentient (pick your favourite word) to be charged and indicted.

So the Biden Department of Justice has brought two of the four cases against Mr Trump, one of those two being the Florida classified documents case; it has charged the leading opposition figure to the sitting president and his main November opponent. But that same Department of Justice has not charged Mr Biden himself. I suppose that is why more than a few Americans and people around the world see what is happening and assert that there are hefty dollops of selective prosecuting at play – though (to steal the famous line from British TV), ‘You might think that but I couldn’t possibly comment’.

What I can say is that a few US pollsters and many onlookers think that this weaponisation of the courts against Mr. Trump has backfired. It has had the opposite effect to what was intended. It has noticeably helped Mr Trump. A good few independent and swing voters don’t like what they’re seeing as regards these charges against Mr Trump. Nor, it seems, do quite a few black male voters. Even a few Democrat voters are uneasy. Well, it’s now clear that three of the four cases will not get to trial before the November election. Only the New York City Alvin Bragg ‘falsifying business records’ case will. And this is the most risible of a pretty laughable lot. The main witness against Trump was absolutely dissected on cross-examination last week. So we just have to wait to see whether an 87-per-cent-Democrat-voting Manhattan has produced a jury that will find one or two jurors who overcome the visceral hatred this place has for Trump and deliver a hung jury.

It should be an outright acquittal as the charges are a bad joke. But that’s probably too much to hope for.