President Joe Biden, who wears bespoke sneakers to prevent embarrassing collapses and whose command of the English language rivals that of most kindergarteners, is in bad political shape.
Uncle Joe's reelection campaign faces an uphill climb, given his disastrous handling of the economy — including a formal recession and four-decade-high inflation — and his abetting a catastrophic and historically unprecedented invasion on our southern border.
Cynicism and a sense of malaise are ubiquitous, and Americans overwhelmingly think the nation is headed in the wrong direction. Monday's New York Times/Siena College poll reflects this: Former President Donald Trump currently leads in five of the six most crucial swing states.
Given their terrible candidate, the candidate's awful track record, and their tremendous (if unjustified) fear that a second Trump term would pose an existential threat to "our democracy" (which they disingenuously claim to care about), it is unsurprising that Democrats have resorted to some of the slimiest tactics imaginable to derail Trump's comeback bid and push their senile octogenarian across the November finish line.
Properly skeptical of their chances to topple Trump in a fair mano-a-mano, the Democrat-lawfare complex in 2023 conjured up four separate criminal prosecutions — two federal probes and two state probes — targeting the 45th president. After all, if you can't beat him, then ... prosecute and incarcerate him! All in the name of "our democracy," naturally.
Suffice it to say that the Democrat-lawfare complex's brazen, cynical attempt to subvert our constitutional order in the name of saving it has not gone according to plan.
In Washington, D.C., special counsel Jack Smith's crown-jewel case against Trump, pertaining to the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 jamboree at the U.S. Capitol, has been interrupted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices stepped in to assess the thorny constitutional question of the scope of immunity from criminal prosecution for former presidents, and a decision is not expected until late June.
The most likely result is a mixed opinion that holds some "core" Article 2 presidential functions are immune from post-presidency prosecution, but other acts are not. This would require a remand to the trial court for fact-finding to determine which legal category the acts in Smith's indictment fall into.
That trial court finding could then be appealed, too. There is virtually no chance Smith can wrap this all up before November.
In Florida, Smith's other federal case has not been more successful. The Florida prosecution, pertaining to Trump's post-presidency handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, had at least some potential on the legal merits.
But Smith wildly overplayed his hand by charging Trump with violating the controversial World War I-era Espionage Act, and the proceedings have frequently been set back due to the strenuous demands of the Classified Information Procedures Act — a 1980 statute first introduced in the Senate, ironically, by then-Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.
Recently, Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely postponed the trial start date, which had initially been scheduled for May 20. There is again little to no chance Smith can reach a jury before November.
The case in Fulton County, Georgia, which once seemed the most perilous of them all due to Georgia's sprawling Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the far-left Atlanta jury pool, and the potential for high-profile prosecution witnesses, has gone totally off the rails.
Ever since January, the only questions in the case have not been substantive legal issues such as whether Trump oversaw a grand conspiracy to "overturn an election," but tabloid fodder such as whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her illicit extramarital lover and appointed special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, are too compromised to bring the case.
The trial court's finding that only one of them must recuse is now pending before a Georgia appellate court, and it is likely the Supreme Court of Georgia will weigh in, too. This case isn't reaching a jury before November, either.
That leaves the ongoing drama in New York City, where a literal porn "star" (Stormy Daniels) and a convicted felon (Michael Cohen) are aiding the George Soros-funded prosecutor's case of ... well, he hasn't exactly told us what it is.
We surmise the case entails alleged New York State fraudulent bookkeeping charges in furtherance of a federal campaign finance law violation — which doesn't even fall into the local district attorney's jurisdiction. The prosecution is about to rest its case, and we don't even know for sure what the actual black-letter legal case is.
On Thursday, the "star witness" convicted felon's testimony was so bad that far-left CNN anchor Anderson Cooper remarked: "I think if I was a juror in this case watching that, I would think this guy is making it up as he's going along." Brutal.
The Democrats' strategy is failing. But it is up to the American people to make them pay for it.
Josh Hammer is the Senior Editor-at-Large of Newsweek, and is host of "The Josh Hammer Show" podcast. He also authors the weekly newsletter, "The Josh Hammer Report." Josh is also a syndicated columnist through Creators Syndicate, a research fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation, and a popular campus speaker. Read Josh Hammer's Reports — Here.