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.
On Tuesday, Trump arrived at a New York City criminal court to face charges brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who campaigned for the office two years ago on a platform to investigate the former president. Bragg’s success in capturing an indictment marks the first time a former president has seen charges brought against them. The Manhattan charges stem from 2016 hush money payments in a case so weak prosecutors previously declined to pursue.
Trump is scheduled to make prime-time remarks from his Mar-a-Lago palace Tuesday night. The Florida residence was raided by FBI agents last August under a separate investigation at the personal direction of Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland. President Biden, meanwhile, has remained silent on the political prosecution of his chief antagonist and likely opponent in the upcoming election. Trump leads nearly every poll conducted for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination by double digits.
“Biden’s strategy on Trump’s indictment: No comment,” read a headline from the Associated Press.
The incumbent president’s silence speaks volumes while the administration continues to conduct prosecutorial investigations of the Democrat’s Republican White House predecessor. One investigation by the Department of Justice is probing whether to indict Trump on charges related to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, and another is investigating possible violations of the Presidential Records Act. Both are being run by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
[READ: Why All The Other ‘Get Trump’ Cases Are Just As Weak As The Manhattan DA’s]
Last summer, the FBI confiscated 15 boxes from Trump’s possession at Mar-a-Lago, purportedly containing classified documents. In January, Americans learned federal authorities found four troves of classified records in Biden’s private possession from the commander-in-chief’s time as vice president.
Trump faces one more criminal probe by local prosecutors in Georgia determining whether to press charges over efforts to challenge the 2020 election.
This past July, a report in Axios infuriated Beltway elites by outlining Trump’s plans for a complete overhaul of the federal bureaucracy, starting with the Department of Justice, which has been weaponized to go after political minorities. Trump raised $5 million for his 2024 presidential campaign within the first 48 hours of his indictment.
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.
[RELATED: Merrick Garland’s Department Of Justice Is A Threat To The Republic]
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.
