Former President Donald Trump’s Thursday indictment inaugurated America’s stage as a banana republic. Now, Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin both have something in common as authoritarian rulers: their chief political opponents are both under arrest. …

The avalanche of investigations by proponents of the Washington regime place Trump in a similar position as Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a political martyr who placed a target on his own back for dissident activism.

In March last year, Navalny was given a 9-year prison sentence in a Russian court after already serving more than two-and-a-half years in a penal colony east of Moscow. Russian prosecutors accused Navalny of committing fraud and contempt of court. Similar to the Trump investigations in New York, Georgia, and Washington D.C. orchestrated to keep the former president off the ballot, the aggressive prosecution of Putin’s lead opposition figure has been widely condemned as politically motivated.

[This is a tad bit overwrought. In the first place, an indictment by the New York County DA doesn’t have any formal connection to the White House, and it’s worth noting that both the FEC and DoJ have declined to take up this particular case against Trump. That doesn’t make Tristan entirely wrong, however, especially when one considers the lawfare waged against Trump in the Russia-collusion hoax. — Ed]