The New York judge’s non-legal, hyper-partisan ruling will only make Trump stronger

One of the tricks of knowing when a leftist judge is pulling a fast one is if the decision is really, really long. Doing this, as W.S. Gilbert would have said, is intended to “lend an air of verisimilitude to an otherwise unconvincing narrative.” In modern English: it hides the dishonesty. The fact that Judge Arthur Engoron, who repeatedly showed his partisan stripes, needed 92 pages to impose an almost $400 million hit-job judgment against Trump is just another phase in the Democrat establishment’s war against America. This won’t harm Trump. It will only make him greater.

Hiding behind the 92 pages of legal-sounding garbage are some simple facts. As you recall, New York Attorney General Letitia James ran on a single platform: I will destroy Trump. She then filed a civil suit against him for fraud, alleging that he lied to banks about the value of his assets to obtain loans. The suit ignored two pertinent points:

• None of the banks suffered damages. Indeed, all of them were fully repaid in a timely manner, and they were happy to do business with Trump again.
• When a corporation comes to a bank seeking a large loan and offering its own valuation of its assets, the bank’s due diligence requires it to confirm those valuations. At this business scale, banks never take the borrower’s valuations without double-checking. When you’re at Trump’s level, you really can’t lie for a loan.

Once in court, there were some other problems. For example, Judge Engoron ruled that the alleged lie at the core of Trump’s efforts to obtain funds fraudulently was his claim about Mar-a-Lago’s worth. According to Engoron, in a region in which property values routinely exceed $100 million, Mar-a-Lago was worth only $18 million. (In fact, even in that region, Mar-a-Lago is special because it’s ginormous and has two ocean fronts—one on the east and one on the west.) That was a ruling driven either by profound ignorance or partisan fraud.

Trump fighting the balrog by AI.

Engoron also has a history of showing that he believes that the rules don’t apply to him. In 2002, when he was working for a judge, he started to date the secretary who worked for a plaintiff’s lawyer, a gross ethical violation. He’s also explicitly said that rules he doesn’t like don’t apply. (Leftist judges do this a lot. I know. I’ve seen it.)

And, of course, he’s utterly beholden to the Democrat establishment in New York. That establishment got him onto the bench, and that’s where his loyalties are obviously going to lie.

Given the above factors, the judgment against Trump was inevitable. It’s the amount that’s so staggering. Never before in New York’s history has a court awarded damages in such staggering amounts relative to actual damages—and here, no one was actually damaged. Indeed, generally speaking, in my thirty-five years as an attorney, I’ve never seen an appellate court uphold damages so disproportionate to actual injuries suffered—and again, there were no injuries in this case. The fact that there were no injuries in itself means that the case, from ig to zack, denied Trump due process.

I don’t see the judgment surviving an appeal, that’s for sure. However, from the Democrat perspective, an appeal is irrelevant. As far as Democrats are concerned, the taint is in place now. Surely, Americans will never vote for a businessman kicked out of New York state for three years and told to pay almost $400 million in damages for bank fraud.

I’m not so sure.

Despite being pacified by easy sex, smartphones, streaming television, and legal pot, Americans are wising up. (They weren’t so much a sleeping giant as they were a sedated one.) Unless they’re stone-cold leftist ideologues, they understand two things: First, America is in substantially worse condition under Joe Biden’s aegis than it was under Trump’s.

During the Trump presidency, until COVID came along, the economy was thriving, inflation was low, illegal immigration was diminishing, crime was lessening, and the world was at relative peace. Since Biden took office, the economy is in free fall, inflation is destroying wealth, tens of millions of known and unknown illegal aliens (many of whom are military-aged men from hostile countries) have entered America, crime is raging through American cities, and the world is burning. Objectively speaking, Trump was way better.

Second, Americans understand that the Biden administration and its minions in the tech sector have utterly destroyed the First Amendment’s rights of speech and assembly. Thanks to January 6, conservatives know that assembly is barred to them. Tech companies—and we know now that they work with the Deep State—have censored them. And according to a new Tucker interview that I haven’t yet had the chance to watch, the military-industrial complex is censoring Americans in ways that are invisible and catastrophic:

This is the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen.

I’m not exaggerating. This is like a mushroom trip without the mushrooms.

Clear your schedule tonight and listen together.

In a week, everyone who has not listened to this will look like an idiot to everyone who has.… https://t.co/P4AcWsRIyK

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) February 17, 2024

What this means is that Americans have only one form of protest left to them: Voting for Trump. He is the avatar of everything that’s been happening to normal Americans. He’s been attacked, defamed, censored, and imprisoned and is being economically destroyed. He is the embodiment of every American who is punished for opposing the Democrat program to destroy America’s economy, national security, cultural homogeneity, children’s physical and mental integrity, and overall way of life.

The lawfare (both criminal and civil) against Trump only emphasizes that he is the biggest target, not the only one. Americans understand that each of these cases is a sham and that, as the meme goes, “They’re not after Trump. They’re after you. He’s just in the way.”

And so, I think that this latest assault on Trump, rather than filling people with revulsion, will bring many around. The Democrat party and the Deep State are the Balrog, straight from the fiery depths of government hell, and Trump is Gandalf standing there saying, “You shall not pass!” And sure, Gandalf fell with the Balrog into that pit but he returned stronger and more powerful than ever.