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With last week’s indictment of former President Donald Trump, the country has entered an unsettling new era characterized by chronic dysfunction, according to prominent conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson.
The New York grand jury’s indictment of Trump, the first ever of a current or former president, is “going to open up a new phase we’ve never seen before in the country that political differences are going to be adjudicated out by warring prosecutors,” Hanson told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program on April 3.
Hanson, a Hoover Institution fellow, in the interview, shared his perspective on the left’s strategy to undermine the republic, the simmering anger of half of the country, and the best way Trump could react to the criminal probes targeting him.
On March 30, a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict Trump in relation to the payment of hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels weeks before the 2016 presidential election.
Although the specifics of the charges will not be disclosed until the arraignment hearing on April 4, they are widely expected to include felony charges of falsifying business records. This charge would require Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to prove that Trump forged records to cover up a violation of federal campaign finance laws—a novel legal strategy that some experts believe to be high risk.
In addition to this case, Trump faces three other criminal probes. Special counsel Jack Smith is investigating Trump’s handling of classified documents, and his alleged role in interfering with the 2020 election results and the lawful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021. A Fulton County grand jury is also probing whether Trump unlawfully interfered with the 2020 election in Georgia.‘Lawfare’
The indictment, Hanson said, has “changed politics from the popular vote, ballot, elections to legality lawfare.”
“So it’s politics by other means,” he said. “What it means is that almost every ex-president, or maybe even every president, or official could be the target of a publicity-seeking state or local attorney that is in the political opposition.”
According to Hanson, if Republicans reciprocated what Democrats are doing, people would see House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) creating committees like the Jan. 6 panel and cherry-picking its members, and state prosecutors in red states like Florida, Utah, and Wyoming concurrently going after President Joe Biden’s family for different counts.
“The whole country would be dysfunctional,” he said.
In an essay published on April 2, Hanson wrote that the left knew that if Republicans matched tit-for-tat the approaches of some Democrats, “then the republic would quickly descend into a spiral of illegality and chaos analogous to what ended the late Roman Republic.
