Trump blasted the latest charges against him as “persecution of a political opponent” Thursday, after pleading not guilty to committing fraud in his bid to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
But, of course, he’s wrong.
He’s being prosecuted, not persecuted.
Persecution means “hostility and ill-treatment, especially on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation or political beliefs.”
This is not about Trump’s ignorant and twisted political beliefs. Each of the three cases brought against him are based on evidence that he violated federal or state laws.
“Trump is not the victim of political persecution,” David Graham wrote in The Atlantic. “A bedrock principle of American law is that no one — not even the president, much less the former president — is above the law, and if they commit crimes, they must answer for them.”
Nor have the indictments against Trump turned the U.S. into a “banana republic,” as Rep. Andy Harris, Maryland’s lone Republican in Congress and staunch Trumpie, tweeted Tuesday night. My column today is about how wrong Harris is about that — and how his own actions are more “banana republican” than anything we’ve seen from Jack Smith and the Department of Justice.
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Dan Rodricks 
You are correct, as usual, sir. I can not, for the life of me, understand why men like Andy Harris, who is a formally educated citizen of the United States, continues to hold his good opinion of a man like donald trump.
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To quote Hamilton: “When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits — despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ ”
He was a wise man! Thanks for your astute column, as always. – Connie Robinson
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Did you read the column? The headline said “wrong again.”
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