The United States Justice Department through special counsel Jack Smith has asked the judge in one of Trump’s 4–count ’em four!–criminal cases to shut the former president up.

Jason Willick, legal columnist for the Washington Post, has a modest proposal: Do it. Gag the former president and likely Republican nominee, preventing him from criticizing the current administration.

New column: Go ahead, gag Donald Trump https://t.co/NetauEVjWP

— Jason Willick (@jawillick) September 19, 2023

Before you get your dander up, as I surely did at the headline, Willick is making a good point worth considering. While he doesn’t come out and say that the Biden Administration is being absolutely abusive in its power by prosecuting Trump, he comes pretty close to it.

The prosecution of a leading candidate for president–one who clearly has a shot at removing the current president–is unprecedented and profoundly troubling. In an ostensibly democratic regime, the notion that a candidate who received the second-highest number of votes in history and who is running neck and neck in an upcoming election should be prosecuted is scary as hell.

Whatever you think of Trump, take a step back: about half the country thinks that whatever his flaws his leadership would be better for America than the guy who is trying to knock him out of the race. Unless you are willing to destroy democracy in order to save it, the argument should take place in the public square and not in a courtroom. Denying tens of millions of people a choice in an election is profoundly undemocratic. The latest polls show Biden LOSING to Donald Trump–what does democracy look like if the current president saves his own bacon by throwing his opponent in jail?

Willick’s point about gagging Trump must be understood in this context: he seems to be saying to the Democrats that they have crossed the line so far that they might as well go all the way and make it illegal for Trump to criticize Biden, or even jail Trump. It is only a few more feet down the slippery slope.

I think the election interference case against Trump is legally flawed and — to the extent that it is valid — unwise to prosecute in the middle of an election season. The criminal-legal system, with all its punitive strictures, wasn’t designed to function with leading presidential candidates as defendants. And the presidential election system, with all its fierce competition and vituperative debate, wasn’t designed to function with defendants as candidates.

But there’s no going back. Smith’s insistence on indicting Trump over the 2020 election and trying him in the 2024 election year, combined with Republican voters’ insistence on making Trump their party’s presidential front-runner, has set up an inexorable clash between democratic politics and the law. There’s no fine-tuning it, no gentling of the legal and political processes to satisfy both. This is a head-on collision, and one or the other must yield.

Willick is right in every respect here. By now any claims that “justice is blind” and that the legal case is totally apolitical is rubbish. A big, stinking pile of rubbish that was thrown into a cesspool and lit on fire. It is ludicrous, just as it is ludicrous to claim that the Hunter Biden prosecution has been conducted in an impartial manner.

Even the claim that our current “justice” system is impartial and apolitical in bread-and-butter criminal cases is absurd. Look at what the Soros prosecutors have been doing. Look at “prosecutorial discretion.” Any references to pieties about impartial justice these days are beyond parody.

There is vastly more evidence against Joe Biden for corruption than there ever was against Trump, yet we see no special prosecutor. There were constant claims that Trump misused the power of government, but where were the criminal investigations of Clinton or Joe Biden? Trump may have said “lock her up,” but never did a thing to do so. Biden and the Democrats are doing it.

I’m tempted to condemn Smith’s request for a gag order as an intrusion on the 2024 election, but that would miss the point. The Justice Department has already decided to thrust itself into the middle of the election. It might as well follow through: Prohibit Trump from attacking the proceedings, and when he doesn’t comply, jail him for contempt mid-campaign. Isn’t that what Attorney General Merrick Garland means when he says “no person is above the law”? Prosecutors have made their bed; they should lie in it.

Smith’s motion, which District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan has to rule on, claims to seek only a “modest” gag order. That’s not true. The prosecutor wants to bar Trump from “disparaging and inflammatory” statements not just about potential witnesses but also about “any party” to the case in United States v. Trump. That seems to include the prosecution and Biden’s Justice Department in general.

Willick notes that if this is done Trump would be barred from making the obviously legitimate charge that the prosecution is political. In other words, one of his key arguments for being elected would be rendered criminal to make. That is absurd, but no more absurd than any other part of this farce.

Willick’s case can be summed up as: “You’ve gone Banana Republic already, might as well go all the way.”

He has a point. Why even pretend?