Trump has forgotten the golden rule of politics: analysis

U.S. President Donald Trump attends an event to announce a deal with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk on to reduce the prices of GLP-1 weight‑loss drugs during an event in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C.

Conservative New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens said President Donald Trump has forgotten the golden rule that empowered his own campaign in his run for election.

“Generally speaking, the idea of trying to criminalize your political opponents is a bad one,” said Stephens, pointing out that criminality “has actually worked in Trump’s favor.”

“You can trace Trump’s political resurrection, in early 2023 when the political smart set thought Ron DeSantis was the likely Republican nominee, almost to the moment the criminal indictments started to be brought against him,” said Stephens, who added that Democrats can’t expect that treating Trump like an outlaw can hurt him or was ever going to “given that his whole political persona is based on its outlaw appeal.”

The only legitimate case Trump has faced, in Stephens’ opinion, was the classified documents case.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni argued that the Georgia elections case against Trump seemed legit with the existence of audiotape of Trump demanding Georgia election head Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 nonexistent votes.

“How is that not wrong and rank?” Bruni demanded.

“Wrong and rank don’t equal criminal,” argued Stephens, adding that Georgia prosecutor Fanni Willis couldn’t make a case out of it, and now a judge has “dismissed it for good.”

Criminalizing your opponent often emboldens and empowers them, but now the Trump administration itself is falling for the same game with its pursuit of former FBI Director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Likewise, both Stephens and Bruni believe the administration is hurting itselfby attempting to demote and cut the pension of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) for reminding federal personnel that they can ignore illegal orders.

“[But] this has always been the Trumpian M.O.: the desperate, and unwittingly revealing, need to show that they’re the bigger man,” said Stephens. “The larger problem, though, is that a politics of politicized justice, of pursuing petty vendettas, winds up being self-defeating. The lesson of the efforts to prosecute Trump in the last administration is that trying to jail your political enemies winds up making them stronger. That’s exactly what this administration is going to wind up doing: strengthening its opponents. Which, perversely, may not be the worst thing.”

Read the New York Times report at this link.

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