In recent weeks, several credible Republican presidential candidates have emerged. The list includes Ron DeSantis, with his red-blooded gubernatorial record in Florida and his “war on woke,” Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina with a moderate tone and strong international experience, Tim Scott, a businessman and senator with a message of self-reliance, Chris Christie, a pugnacious East Coaster, and former Vice President Mike Pence, a Midwest conservative.
Someone in there, you’d think, for every flavor of Republican. And not a single one of them has been indicted by the federal government.
The same, of course, cannot be said for former President Donald Trump. A grand jury in U.S. District Court in Miami served up charges relating to Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. On social media, Trump denied the charges and proclaimed his innocence.
These federal charges came on top of the previous state charges from the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, relating to hush-money payments made in 2016 by Trump to a former pornographic movie actress. Trump pleaded not guilty to those charges.
In essence, America now finds itself with a wholly undesirable situation in which the administration of a sitting American president is striving to convict not just a man who could well be his opponent in the upcoming presidential election, but a former president to boot. This is the kind of situation associated with struggling democracies flirting with autocracies or with a tinpot dictatorship, not the leading nation of the free world.