Donald Trump is now President of the United States for a second term, having survived an unprecedented campaign of lawfare that has included no fewer than four criminal prosecutions, two state and two federal, brought during the four years that he was out of office. All were brought by highly partisan Democratic Party prosecutors.
The four prosecutions of Trump are all now essentially dead. However, much of the process of killing off these prosecutions has occurred either since Trump’s re-election, or only because of the fortuity of Trump getting enough appointments to the Supreme Court during his first four years in office to have an effective majority on that Court.
To get an idea of how things might have gone differently for Trump, we need only look to the country of Brazil. There, a couple of weeks ago, on September 11, the prior President and leader of the opposition party, Jair Bolsonaro, just got sentenced to some 27 years in prison. According to the BBC, the charges against Bolsonaro included “armed criminal conspiracy,” “attempted abolition of the democratic rule of law,” and “attempted coup d'état.” In other words, the charges against Bolsonaro sound very similar to the charges against Trump in the Jack Smith Washington DC prosecution.
And yet the BBC also states that the subsequent and current President, known as Lula, “was sworn in without incident on 1 January 2023.” To be fair, there was unrest following the October 2022 election that was ultimately called for Lula, and on January 8, 2023, after Lula took office, Bolsonaro’s supporters staged a large protest in the capital of Brasilia, that turned violent. Bolsonaro himself was out of the country at the time, actually in Orlando, Florida.
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