We see overreaching all the time in campaigns. Indeed, we see plenty of outright lying (and Trump isn’t guiltless either, not of that). But what we have not seen up to now in this country is the in-party dragooning the fearsome power of prosecution to cripple the opponent of the out-party.

The New York Times argued convincingly this weekend in a long piece (paywalled) that Trump’s view of the United States and the American justice system has darkened considerably since 2016.

But what the Times didn’t acknowledge is that Trump now has every reason to view American law as hopelessly politicized and prosecutors as targeting him. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the three other indictments Trump faces, the Manhattan case is a travesty, a poison pill that no amount of sugarcoating can hide.

Which right there captures the huge and ugly extent of the danger the Manhattan prosecution poses. If Trump loses a close election, millions of people will believe it was because of this politically-based, jury-rigged case and the relentless partisan hype that followed it. If he wins, he’ll bring to his Office an (understandably) jaundiced view of the prosecution function, with all the dangers that poses in the man who will appoint the Attorney General and every United States Attorney. And it won’t stop there, either. There’s the prospect, if not the probability, that he would further corrupt the power of prosecution in the ways his opponents did, in order to exact revenge on them — in other words, to ingrain in the justice system, for years if not decades, a cycle of recrimination over fair-mindedness that would degrade the rule of law, and respect for law, in ways America has never seen on such a scale before.