Trump and his defenders say the justice system has been "weaponized" against him.
We are familiar with the argument about unfair policing. We have heard the counter-argument: The person did the crime.
Biden is handling this correctly: He is staying out. Staying quiet. Let the evidence speak.
The issue of prejudicial policing has mostly been a complaint by the political left. Everyone has heard of the "crime" of "driving while Black" and "driving while Hispanic." We have seen targeting of Blacks in stop-and-frisk policing. The left calls it prejudiced. Police and their defenders say that the crime statistics warrant the special focus, and policing follows crime, not race. Deaths at the hands of police led to mass demonstrations and calls by some on the left to "defund the police." Now some Republicans are calling for defunding the FBI.
Trump isn't against weaponization of the justice system. He is against the Justice Department investigating him. Last week he said if re-elected he would appoint "a real special prosecutor." This one would "go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family."
Cases over policing have punctuated recent news: The shoot-on-arrival death of Tamir Rice, the death of Breonna Taylor in a hail of gunfire while police carried out a search warrant, the suffocation of George Floyd, the shooting of Ashli Babbitt, and the arrests coming out of BLM protests and the January 6 insurrection. Sometimes there is good video evidence. People see different things. I saw Ashli Babbitt as part of a mob breaking through a door attempting to enter the House Chamber, intending violence against Congress members. Trump disagrees. He calls Babbitt a patriot and martyr, unjustly murdered while fighting for justice. In politics it is a matter of who is fighting for what and a matter of majorities. Trump said:
If this happened to the "other side," there would be riots all over America, and yet there are far more people represented by Ashli, who truly loved America, than there are on the other side.
Trump's legal strategy in his current and impending indictments is a political strategy. He attacks the prosecution. In conservative media, Trump is picked on, the charges are bogus, that he is no more guilty than Biden -- indeed less guilty. Rivals of Trump don't want to defend Trump's innocence, so most picked up the bank-shot narrative. Defend Trump by blaming Biden.
Biden is letting this narrative grow, un-rebutted. It is the principled approach. It is politically dangerous for him. He is being hands-off while being accused of being too feeble to be hands-on. To his credit, he isn't trying to manage his reputation for vigor. He is managing his reputation for being the normal, low-drama advocate for non-political justice. Biden turned prosecution over to Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, who turned it over to Jack Smith, the special prosecutor. Jack Smith isn't grandstanding. Smith looks dour. Garland looks punctilious. The Biden approach is on brand: Low drama, things-are-back-to-normal. He trusts that the institutions of justice still have credibility, at least when they are led by people who appear deliberate and careful.
The power of the presidency is the power to persuade, to explain stuff, to create a narrative that makes sense of the world. Biden is hoping body language does the persuading. He trusts that there is a decisive persuadable portion of the American electorate open to being swayed by objective facts. By documents. By tapes.
Especially tapes. Again and again in areas of disputed policing, the public has come to some resolution by seeing and hearing tapes. The retained-documents case broke open upon revelation of a recording of Trump bragging about having secret documents he cannot legally show because they are classified and he can't declassify them. That is a confession.
Maybe a majority of Americans simply don't care. Democrats have laid the groundwork of doubting the fairness of policing. Now it is the GOP's turn to do that. But there was always the GOP counter-argument when people protested suspect policing if it came to an arrest: It isn't bad policing if they found evidence of a crime. Maybe a person was stopped and frisked, but then police found an illegal gun. Maybe a person was pulled over for speeding, but he was recorded on radar going well above the speed limit. Equal or unequal policing wasn't the point, they argue. The point is that the person did the crime. The police did their job. Don't complain.
Trump was given every chance to give back the documents, and he refused, hid them, and lied about it. Like Ashli Babbitt, he was warned, but persisted anyway. She paid the price. Now it is Trump's turn. It is all on tape. He did the crime.
Biden isn't silent, not really. Biden is letting the crime speak for itself.
The former president is a textbook case of accusing others of what he has or would do. He's a liar. Pure and simple. That people fall for this shtick is incredible. If he told me it was raining I would check.