Law Prof: Trump Indictment Is Embarrassing ... And It's Trump's Fault
Talk about blaming the victim.
A law professor who took to The New York Times on Wednesday in a commentary piece on the indictment of former President Donald Trump didn’t hold back in dismantling the legal nonsense presented by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in a history-making case.
But liberals should be comforted. It turns out that that wasn’t Bragg’s fault.
Over the course of more than 1,500 words, Jed Shugerman, identified by the Times as a law professor at Fordham University in New York City and Boston University in Boston, excoriated Bragg’s indictment, calling it a “legal embarrassment,” “weak,” and a set-up for a trial that would be the “rule of the circus” rather than the rule of law.
Shugerman described the 34-count indictment as “34 half-indictments,” and acknowledged that “it is hard not to ask whether Mr. Trump was actually treated worse than other similarly situated defendants …” He went into considerable detail about how Bragg’s case was trespassing on federal court jurisdiction and might be invalidated because of it.
In fact, he delivered a devastating critique of the Manhattan prosecutor’s work that a conservative could cheer at. Except for one major caveat:
The fault for such shoddy persecution at the hands of a man sworn to uphold the law lies not in Bragg’s office or in Bragg himself, Shugerman strongly suggested. The fault is with Trump.
“This legal embarrassment reveals new layers of Trumpian damage to the legal foundations of the United States,” Shugerman wrote: “Mr. Trump’s opponents react to his provocations and norms violations by escalating and accelerating the erosion of legal norms.”
“Trumpian damage?”
It might have been the only way to get what is otherwise a seemingly sensible piece into the notoriously liberal New York Times, but to blame the legal travesty taking place in Manhattan on “Trumpian” anything is victim-blaming on a vast scale.
It’s not just singling out a billionaire real estate developer, celebrity and reality television impresario who turned politician, it’s an implicit attack on the tens of millions of American citizens who supported Trump in 2016, who supported him through the partisan warfare of his presidency, and who support him today in the face of unrelenting lawfare.
It’s also patently false, placing responsibility for the depraved behavior of leftists from street-thug antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters to the highest reaches of the establishment media and the federal government on a political movement that aims only to protect the American freedoms that were established by the Founders and have lasted more than 230 years.
More than a few social media users understood that:
Said every abusive husband ever:
“Just look what she made me do!”
Have these people no shame whatsoever? No concern at all what posterity might think of them?
— Diana Villiers (@DianaVilliers1) April 5, 2023
Ahh yes, the petulant preschooler defense – look what you made me do!
— TeaganV 🇺🇸 🐾 (@TeaganV1212) April 5, 2023
This is the political equivalence to “she was asking for it.”
— John Smith (@PoisonWombat2) April 6, 2023
“People who can never take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions…probably vote Dem,” one user wrote.
People who can never take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions…probably vote Dem 🤦♀️
— Nancy the Neanderthal 🇺🇸 (@nan_mclellan) April 6, 2023
The establishment media openly abandoned event the pretense of upholding the principles of fairness in journalism during the Trump years, led — naturally enough — by the Times.
In an August 2016 front-page commentary, then-Times’ media columnist Jim Rutenberg essentially declared that it was open season on Trump because it is “It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment.”
Actually, it’s journalism’s job to be true to the facts, full stop. Whatever the opinions of readers and viewers and whatever “history’s judgment” is supposed to mean, it doesn’t mean “journalism ” in the sense of the word that Americans used to understand it.
(During the Obama administration, the White House press corps was in the main made up of embarrassingly submissive handmaidens to the man in the White House. During the Trump years, they were mainly shrieking harpies. But they were no more “journalists” than drunken, jersey-wearing fans rooting for the home team on Sundays are dispassionate NFL analysts. It’s a good chance any sensible American understood that.)
And so, even while writing a piece that utterly eviscerates the pretension that Manhattan’s attorney general is working to uphold the “law” with a dangerously flawed indictment, a law professor feels it necessary to blame Donald Trump for the sins of the institutions that are debasing themselves to attack him.
But the rest of America knows who’s really at fault.
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