Townhall Review | Commentaries

Chalk it up to the law of unintended consequences. The Biden campaign welcomed Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump.

They expected the conviction to destroy Trump’s standing in the polls. They didn’t realize their lawfare would help Trump erode Biden’s last remaining advantage—his fundraising.

In the first day after the guilty verdict, Trump raised $53 million dollars. His May total was an eye-popping $141 million dollars—almost twice as much as he raised in April. Trump had raised $124 million from 2021 through April of 2024. Now he’s more than doubled that figure.

For context: Biden’s raised some $195 million to date.

Given his sorry record, all Biden can do is demonize Trump. If the former president can summon the discipline to focus on a policy agenda for the future, he’s sitting in the catbird seat.

It certainly looks like he’ll have the resources to get his message out.

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“Say their names.” That was the phrase of seemingly innocent people in America killed due to presumptions of racism. “Bring Back our Girls.” That was an international cry that Michelle Obama gave voice to—referring to the young girls kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram, Africa’s version of Hamas.

Brittney Griner, detained in Russia, was the subject of a massive public pressure and release campaign. We heard her name over and over again.

Evan Gershkovich, the journalist, is still imprisoned and we hear repeated statements of support.  

And yet: There are American hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza, and have been since October. If their faces and names are posted in public, they are often torn down—something we wouldn’t do with lost dogs.

Daily, we should be saying their names: Edan Alexander, Sagui Dekel-Chen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Omer Neutra, Keith Siegel. Let’s remind the nation and the world that American life is not cheap.  Look at what Israel was willing to do this past weekend for four Israelis.  

What are we doing for five Americans?

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Ever since the October 7 massacres inflamed the radical Left in the US, Joe Biden has tried to force Israel into compromises that would force them to allow Hamas to survive the war. This week, NBC News reported that Biden now wants to deal with Hamas directly on American hostages and cut Israel out entirely. 

This abruptly changes months of avoiding the issue of Hamas’ American captives. The media has ignored them, and the Biden administration only refers to them when necessary—usually as leverage against Netanyahu’s government in Jerusalem. The timing of this trial balloon seems especially suspicious, given the spectacular success of the IDF’s hostage rescue operation this past weekend. 

Western nations have foolishly dispensed with the best policy—that is: never to negotiate with terrorists. Biden takes it all in a particularly malevolent direction: Cutting Israel out of the loop while pushing a two-state solution at the UN. 
Don’t miss the broader message: It rewards Hamas for the October 7 massacre. 

In a word, it’s despicable.

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Exxon has long been subjected to harassing proposals from anti-oil and anti-gas activists, forcing their proposals on the company’s annual meetings with the help of federal regulators.  The activists’ agenda—to be clear—would destroy those companies and the American economy along with it. Exxon took legal action … and the proposal was dropped.

Blue states then attempted to use their retirees pension assets to stage a coup for control of Exxon, the world's largest privately owned energy company.

Red states represented by the State Financial Officers Foundation fought back, urging investment firms to back the board.

What happened?

Exxon, red states, real investors and freedom won big. The entire board was reelected with an average of 95 percent support.

If the blue states had succeeded, this would have been the first time in American history that a state government essentially took control of a publicly traded company.

 

We dodged a bullet.

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An initiative undertaken by citizens of California that would have protected the rights of parents failed to get the requisite number of signatures to even make it to the ballot.

The measure would have prevented the public schools from hiding a child’s transgender identity issues at the schools from the parents.

It failed, but there’s a lesson here: Attorney General of California, Rob Bonta had argued that the title of proposition would be, “Restrict Rights of Transgender Youth Initiative.”

This is almost Orwellian, he was going to tilt the scales.

We must not believe that we look at children and see them as put in the middle with parents having rights on the one side and the school having rights on the other side. No. We have to fight for parental rights.

We don’t give our children over to administrators and the regime of experts.

No government can replace the family. Ever.

But they are trying.

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Eighty years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered the largest mass prayer in history up to that point.  A radio broadcast for our boys in Europe, about to embark on what General Dwight Eisenhower described as “the greatest amphibious assault ever attempted.” 

D-Day.

In that prayer, FDR described our fight as a “crusade” and asked his fellow Americans to pray to God for His will to “prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy.”  Those prayers were answered with those boys—those boys of Point du Hoc, and other beaches.

As put in the American Patriot Almanac: One commander told his men only two types of people would stay on Omaha beach—those dead and those going to die—so they’d better push forward. In some units, 90 percent of the troops were killed or wounded. But the assault managed to cross the beach and drive the Germans inland. We had established our toehold in northern Europe and the war would soon be over.

God bless those boys, those men, and this country.

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We are seeing more and more condemnations of Israel—ostensibly for committing “genocide.”  What a farce!  War is, of course, inherently violent—but because it is violent and people get killed doesn’t make it genocide.

These condemnations come from those who’ve said nothing of what Syria has done to its Arab population—mowing down and chemically weaponizing tens of thousands to death, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees; nothing of China’s liquidation, concentration and re-education camps of millions of Uighurs. And I could go on and on.

Israel is fighting the most just war in this century and last, taking exquisite care not to kill women and children its enemy uses as war shields—which actually is a war crime that nobody seems to care about.  And the enemy, let us not forget, attacked first, in a brutality reminiscent of Genghis Khan.  Hamas—in their charter—calls for the violent elimination of all Jews. 

Fighting this war is not genocide—it is just and it is justice.

Israel must press on and win.

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Just say it to yourself. A Manhattan jury has convicted former President Donald Trump on 34 felony counts. Every part of that is important. 

We are now looking at one district attorney in the United States in a place like Manhattan who's brought a prosecution against a former president. And let's face it, it was political. 

This was considered a zombie case. Alvin Bragg picked it up, and the rest is now history, except history is still being written. 

We are about to find out what Americans actually thought about this trial, and quite frankly, it is unlikely to change many minds looking at the November election for the Office of President of the United States.

Americans are likely to factor this in and understand it for exactly what it is. 

The big challenge for America is knowing what this means for the future of our political culture. 

Have we now become one of these countries where we go after former chief executives? 

It’s a big question, and let's hope the answer given there in New York is not the last word. 

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Citizens must have faith in their justice system: that people will be treated equally under the law, and that defendants are being prosecuted because of what they’ve done, rather than who they are.

Donald Trump’s trial has set a dangerous precedent. The judge allowed the entire case to be prosecuted without ever telling Trump what some of the charges were! His lawyers couldn’t defend him against the alleged “predicate crime” that transformed a misdemeanor—allegedly falsifying business records—into a felony. No one knew what it supposedly was until after the defense was done.

This violates any defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to know what the charges against him are.

The left has taken lawfare to extremes. There may be no going back: history tells us it is much easier to destroy norms than to restore public trust once it has been broken.

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The verdict is in. A Manhattan jury found former President Donald J. Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. 

The jury deliberated only a matter of hours before making their judgment. 

Within seconds, the news was spreading all around the world, and we understand why. This is something unprecedented in American history. 

It's unprecedented in terms of the conviction. It's also unprecedented in terms of the prosecution. 

Have we now become one of those countries which routinely now prosecute former presidents? 

This is an ominous moment for the United States, especially since this particular case, this prosecution, what was known as a “zombie case.” 

An activist prosecutor picked it up, and what we had was effectively in political terms, a show trial. 

Americans are likely to recognize it for what it is and what it is is a big problem for the future of the United States of America. 

Every single one of us had better be concerned. 

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