If you presented this case in a hypo in a law school classroom without mentioning Trump, I don’t think you’d find a single person who say stitching together (1) a time-barred documents misdemeanor with (2) an election manipulation misdemeanor that has apparently never been used before along with (3) uncharged federal campaign finance and tax law violations, into 34 felony counts is an ethical use of prosecutorial discretion. Even some Democrats can see that this is third-world-country stuff: https://nypost.com/2024/05/12/us-news/fareed-zakaria-doubts-...
[1] https://reason.com/2024/05/30/the-verdict-against-trump-sugg...
What truly concerns me though is the fact that we’re almost certainly at the beginning of what’s going to be an endless cycle of political persecutions every election going forward. Democrats have asserted—loudly and proudly—that this is okay to do, so Republicans are going to follow suit, and before you know it, America will be indistinguishable from your average Third World nation.
Even MSNBC legal analysts are calling the case against Trump “some grotesque legal version of Frankenstein’s monster” that “most prosecutors probably wouldn’t have brought at all.” https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-guilty-hus.... If that’s what’s happening on MSNBC, how do you think it comes across to anyone who is even a bit Trump curious? Or even RFK curious (who has also condemned the conviction)?