Trump's 'knee-slapping buffoonish failures' are hiding something

U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as he departs for Asia from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 24, 2025. REUTERS Kylie Cooper

New Republic columnist Greg Sargent says a grand jury may have laughed President Donald Trump’s prosecutors out of court, but the details of the prosecutions suggest horrific abuses of power that carry no humor whatsoever.

“Donald Trump’s efforts to jail his Democratic enemies have thus far mostly been marked by ham-fisted, buffoonish failure,” said Sargent, speaking on the politicized DOJ’s war on Sen. Adam Schiff, (D-Calif.), former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and six Democratic lawmakers who produced a video that made Trump angry, which courts and juries have derailed.

“Yet … a dynamic has kicked in that is oddly helpful to [Trump],” said Sargent. “Thanks to the knee-slapping, comic-relief-inducing nature of these failures, the authoritarian abuses underlying them risk being seen as less threatening than they actually are. That could potentially disarm us for the next round, which will surely come.”

Trump’s prosecutors failed to convince a single member of a jury to indict the lawmakers, but how the indictment came together is one of the most frighting things about it, Sargent said.

“Here’s what happened: After the FBI communicated with the Democratic lawmakers, prosecutors in [the office of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington,] reached out to them to follow up,” said Sargent. “[When defense] attorney Preet Bharara directly asked prosecutors what statute the Democrats had allegedly violated to prompt the criminal inquiry, according to sources familiar with these discussions. The prosecutors could not name any statute, the sources told me.”

“What is the theory of criminal liability?” was the question Bharara’s office demanded. And according to one source speaking with Sargent, “no answer was forthcoming.”

“[Pirro’s] prosecutors had failed to name any violated statute, yet they forged ahead with the effort to indict anyway,” said Sargent.

This suggests prosecutors didn’t think a criminal prosecution was warranted or doubted there was probable cause to think the Democrats had committed a crime. This, in turn, suggests “something or other prompted the rush to indict, perhaps a word from on high that — let’s go way out on a limb here — had little to do with facts and law,” Sargent said.

“Bloomberg reports that Pirro brought in two outsiders to prosecute the case against the Democrats, one of whom is a dance photographer who worked for Pirro decades ago,” said Sargent. “Together they have very little DOJ experience, suggesting they may have been tapped to carry out cases that career prosecutors might be reluctant to attempt — special projects, as it were, for the benefit of the Audience of One.”

“It seems at least to suggest that the prosecutors were not the ones calling the shots, and that what they thought they were doing got run over by their bosses,” Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck told Sargent. “DOJ’s credibility depends on public faith that prosecutions are brought when the law justifies it, not when the political leadership of the administration demands it.”

“The stakes here remain extraordinarily high,” warned Sargent. “… It’s easy to get seduced by the Keystone Kops vibe to all this. But these Keystone Kops continue to wield the enormous power of the federal criminal justice bureaucracy, and they have tethered it to the chaotic whims of a Mad King who thinks that being a Democrat who criticizes him is a prosecutable crime.”

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