No, I’m not kidding. No, I haven’t finally switched sides and joined the Establishment GOP conspiracy to turn the party back into the Washington Generals, who know their job (and love it): to go out and lose gracefully to the Globetrotters every single night.

I honestly want Donald Trump to win this year’s presidential election, even if it goads our Deep State to annul the results or risk a nuclear war. (I pray that foreign leaders would be wise enough not to rise to that lethal bait.)

What I am saying is that none of the manufactured cases against Donald Trump (or other critics of election fraud across the country) has any legal merit. All of them are lawfare, the abuse of our legal system whereby the process is the punishment, in which public authorities with limitless budgets (and support from rich left-wing nonprofits) target private individuals with threats of imprisonment, hoping to bankrupt them and force them to plead out to crimes they never committed because they can’t afford to go on defending themselves. (For more on that, The Stream will soon be launching a series on the Left’s savage use of lawfare to destroy innocent American dissidents. Stay tuned.)

And nothing will highlight that fact more obviously than Trump being forced to run the rest of his campaign from the interior of jail cell.

Did Jake Gardner Die in Vain?

The model case that set this all up is Jake Gardner’s. For defending himself and his elderly father from a George Floyd rioter who was looting Jake’s Omaha business (and then tried to strangle him), Gardner — a decorated Marine and combat hero — was ludicrously accused of hate crimes and first-degree murder. When he tried to defend his innocence and asked crowdfunding to help pay for his lawyer, that right was stripped from him: GoFundMe took down his defense fund. Evicted, defenseless, and publicly tarred as a “white nationalist,” Gardner ultimately took his own life in 2020. Afterward, a Nebraska state senator callously took to Twitter to gloat about his death.

The indictment of Jake Gardner would never have happened without the community, the people, who stood up for justice and demanded action from city officials. Jake Gardner is gone, but the white supremacist attitudes that emboldened him are still with us today. https://t.co/IFw5ZXepAz

— Senator Megan Hunt (@NebraskaMegan) September 21, 2020

That’s the goal. That’s the leftist’s storybook happy ending: “And they were all buried six feet under.” That’s what the corrupt prosecutors and biased judges prosecuting Donald Trump, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, and Mike Flynn are really going for: They want their lead targets dead or in jail, and the rest of us cowering silently in our homes, like beaten-down Venezuelans or Cubans. The lucky and spineless among us can get off a lot easier, of course, by wagging our tails while eating the Left’s filthy kitchen scraps, like toothless Republicans Mitt Romney, Mike Pence, and Mike Johnson.

Americans are increasingly waking up to just how power-hungry, reckless, and lawless our elites really are. Case after case against Trump himself (who has deep pockets, thank God) keeps collapsing, concocted as each one is of half-truths, fabrications, and vendettas by corrupt prosecutors linked to the Biden regime.

The Left thought the sheer weight of fake felonies and nuisance suits would break him and deny the American opposition its choice of a candidate. If enough Fanni Willises throw enough strands of spaghetti at the wall, sooner or later some 99% Democrat jury will agree to say they’ve stuck — and then America will “go back to normal,” they promise us.

Please Let Us Stopping Hitting Ourselves

The problem is that too many conservatives are desperate to believe them. Shocked and appalled at the anarcho-tyranny the Left unleashed on us in response to a single populist’s victory, these self-styled Christians and patriots tell themselves it’s all Trump’s fault, and that of his vulgar, tub-thumping supporters, who don’t understand things like “the norms of civility” and “principled conservatism.” (Which boils down to: “Always bring a rubber chicken to a gunfight. It’s What Jesus Would Do.”)

If we just went back to the old GOP of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney, they think, the chaos and torment will stop. The Democrats are only castrating children and importing millions of uneducated, unvettable, and illegal foreign nationals so they can squat in our homes and vote in our elections because of Donald Trump and his redneck, racist, Bible-thumping Christian Nationalist supporters.

If we just play their game, everything will go back, magically, to 2015, when Democrats weren’t encouraging mobs of Hamas supporters to decapitate statues of George Washington or letting drag queens read filthy stories to kids. That was just the Left’s natural, proportionate response to the rise of Donald Trump. If we just holler “Uncle,” the Deep State and the captured media will let us pull our heads out of the toilet. It really was for our own good, you know. We had to be taught a lesson.

Their Spaghetti Won’t Stick to the Wall

Of course, millions of Americans aren’t willing to eat that bowl of broken glass. The more Trump gets lawlessly persecuted, the angrier and more suspicious of our institutions they become. They start to recollect and wonder, “If the Authorities are willing to do this to Donald Trump, what would they do to little guys like me?”

We already have the answer in the form of the savage campaign of personal destruction aimed at Trump’s attorneys, advisors, and supporters — especially the political prisoners of January 6. And there’s still something so decent, ornery, and cussedly independent inside Americans’ souls that we don’t like it. We don’t like it one single bit. As I noted the other day, elite insiders like Fareed Zakaria and James Carville are noticing that the legal persecution is helping Donald Trump. They’re panicking over that.

That tells me that at some point soon, the master strategists behind Joe Biden’s zombie walk toward reelection will shift gears suddenly. They’ll inform biased judge Juan Merchan in the last still-viable case against Trump — the ludicrous Rube Goldberg pile of expired, unproven, perjury-dependent misdemeanors bootstrapped into felonies in New York — that it’s time to finally succumb to the last resort: follow the law. While it goes against their grain to let an innocent enemy walk, they’ll order the judge to dismiss the charges, and he will.

Trump Must Do Time to Set the Rest of Us Free

That would be a disaster. That would let our media, and much of the GOP try to convince the voting public that everything is normal. We still have a free country, fair elections, and objective, honest media. We’re all patriots here. Nobody’s acting like a South American dictator. Where would you get a crazy notion like that?

Trump’s former attorney John Eastman arrested in Phoenix on kangaroo court charges over his 2020 election work. @Rach_IC reports: https://t.co/ktQUF2HUtC

— MichaelPatrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) May 18, 2024

Trump has to cut them off. He’s still subject to a crackpot, unconstitutional gag order, and he should violate it so flagrantly that Merchan has to lock him up, if only to save face. Trump should insist on campaigning from jail, the way Lech Walesa was forced to under a similar authoritarian regime in Communist Poland.

Because that’s the kind of country we have become, and Americans need to see it, over and over again. Trump’s time in the lockup might be the only thing that will set the rest of us free.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.