How DeSantis can spin the Trump indictment and be elected President.

Ok, I've come up with an idea so warped, you probably think I'm abusing Testers Model Cement.

Strap in; here we go. First off, a NYC court (Bragg's home turf) needs to find Trump Guilty and lock him up. Are you still with me?

Then DeSantis runs on a platform "I will pardon Trump". I know, genius. Tucker Carlson should hire me as his wingman. You're welcome.

The Devil and Alvin Bragg

The Trump indictment brings the country another step closer to a 2024 race it doesn’t need or want., WSJJr. hedcutBy Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.Follow

March 31, 2023 6:12 pm ET

That Thursday’s indictment wouldn’t have been brought against any other member of the human race can be divined almost as readily by listening to a Democratic commentator as a Republican one.

There are issues of the statute of limitations, issues of selective prosecution, issues of overreach in tying the Stormy Daniels payment to an alleged campaign-finance offense the feds themselves declined to prosecute.

The stretch by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in today’s unique political context demands attention. No, not the novelty of Mr. Trump being the first ex-president to be indicted. The bigger twist: It can hardly be exaggerated how expertly Joe Biden and Democrats have navigated themselves down a funnel from which the only escape is Mr. Trump being next year’s GOP nominee.

The sensible analyst Greg Valliere speculated on Bloomberg TV on Friday that the indictment would improve Mr. Trump’s chance of winning the nomination while weakening his chance of winning the general election.

This is a hole-in-one for Mr. Biden. Any other scenario and he would be perceived to be in a deep hole by his own party. He’s got the worst inflation in 40 years, a banking crisis and a possible recession in the offing, never mind the age issue. But even a ham sandwich might have a good chance of beating Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden is the Democrats’ ham sandwich.

Less likely to happen now is the thing that actually should. Mr. Biden and his allies keep telling us that Mr. Trump is a menace to the republic. If they believe this, they have an awesome opportunity. Don’t run. My guess is that Mr. Biden bowing out would open the sluice gates to both parties washing out their Trump-era baggage on the way to 2024, giving us a whole different election than the one we’re dangerously likely to get now. Don’t underestimate how much Mr. Trump’s own presence in the race is a strategy to flummox his legal pursuers.

Mr. Trump’s character, remind yourself, was well-advertised long before 2016. He rose unexpectedly from strength to strength on the behavior of his enemies, the media most importantly, which became more Trump-like than Mr. Trump in its abandonment of the usual standards of honesty and evidence.

In the manner of the greatest demagogues, the compelling story for his supporters eventually stopped being anything Mr. Trump said about policy or governance or the country’s interests; the compelling story became Mr. Trump himself, the symbolic thumb in the establishment’s eye.

This is the gift Democrats gave America, with the Russia-collusion farce most of all. Mr. Trump could not have done this himself. He could not have dreamed it would happen until it did.

The non-clubbable, honest left, which is recent months has increasingly detached itself from the Democratic Party over issues of censorship and disinformation, rightly pointed out early and often that Mr. Trump’s best press agent was Adam Schiff.

The same Columbia Journalism Review that recently aired out the collusion hoax years ago accurately characterized MSNBC as one Mr. Trump’s greatest assets.

In 2020, as this column repeatedly pointedout, an unappreciated asset for Mr. Biden was the distance he kept from the Russia hoax, which made him votable to many crossover Republicans. Alas, original sin visits us all. To get to the presidency, in a perverse twist of fate, Mr. Biden had to become embroiled in a whole new layer of the Russia hoax, via the Hunter Biden laptop and the fog of disinformation about its provenance from the U.S. intelligence community. And the story isn’t finished.

Democrats and their media allies are whistling frantically past the graveyard. The remarkable Philip Bump in the Washington Post recently argued that new revelations of federally flagged “suspicious” payments from a China fixer to members of the Biden family aren’t necessarily proof of anything nefarious. He also strongly militated against any official or journalistic legwork to make sure they aren’t nefarious.

Here we go again—with the FBI, intelligence agencies, prosecutors and the courts getting ready to turn the 2024 presidential election into legal-political clusterphenomenon against which even the 2016 antics of FBI Chief James Comey will pale in comparison.

A God that truly loved America would find a way to intervene before the campaign gets too far along. We could instead get a race between two 40- or 50-something governors from sunny states far from Washington, D.C., who might have played baseball in college. If you are the praying type and on good terms with the Almighty, now is the time to start filling up his suggestion box.