In the 24 hours after the conviction of Mr Trump in what I think was a wholly politicised trial that weaponised the court system against the current President’s main opponent, a record was set. What record?  Americans donated online monies to Mr Trump of nearly US$53 million, a third coming from people who had never donated before. In one day. Nothing remotely close to that has ever happened before. I set out in Flat White immediately after the verdict was announced why I thought this was a political hit job on Mr Trump. Here I note that myriad US legal commentators, including a fair few Democrats, agree. So does Greg Sheridan in the Australian. Meanwhile, President Biden is so tone-deaf that he posted on Twitter the comment ‘No one is above the law’. Really? Because Biden’s own Department of Justice refused to charge him, Biden, with classified document crimes solely on the basis that it was not thought that Biden’s brain was working well enough for a jury to convict him on the mens rea or ‘capable of intending to do it’ component.  Double really? Because Biden’s son Hunter has so far been treated as virtually completely above the law, the prosecutors finding the softest and least worrisome of charges to bring against a man where the evidence against him is overwhelming. Triple really? Because no US state-level prosecutor anywhere in the country, in the history of the US, has ever before indirectly tried to bring federal campaign finance violation charges against anyone. They opted to start with the President’s main opponent. And the prosecuting district attorney here won office on a main election pledge ‘to get Trump’. And you are deluding yourself if you don’t think the Biden administration was quietly involved in this and all the other charges against Trump. Heck, the number-three man at the Biden Department of Justice opted in December 2022 to move to New York to help with this prosecution. And unbelievably we still do not know what the actual indictable offence was or is supposed to be that allowed this misdemeanour book-keeping charge to sidestep the statute of limitations and become a felony – an omission that would see these charges promptly thrown out everywhere in Australia, Canada and Britain for failure to specify the offence. We do know, however, that the judge in how he ran this case gave every single benefit (or glimmer of a benefit) of the doubt to the prosecution. You might think the fact he’s a Biden donor and his daughter is a big-time Biden fundraiser would see him recuse himself. Not a chance. Or that any administration remotely concerned about the country’s future, and intent on bringing a set of charges never before seen anywhere in the country, might at least opt for a jurisdiction that was one other than the second-most Democrat-voting city after Washington DC. But nope.

Meanwhile, the US is now so polarised none of us alive have ever seen anything like it. Watch MSNBC or CNN or most all of the non-Fox legacy media and they are literally wetting themselves in joy over being able to call Trump ‘a convicted felon’. No analysis of the charges or the theory of the case or whether they would ever tolerate a judge who had deep ties with the Republican party and a prosecutor who’d been elected ‘to get them’. (And by the way, the US is a great country but its criminal justice system stinks. Way, way worse than anything anywhere else in the Anglosphere. Mark Steyn has been saying it for years. So have I. Nothing like we’ve seen here against Trump could ever happen in Britain, Canada or Australia – and I include the ACT and Victoria in that claim to bring it home to you.)

It gets better. Trump’s reaction throughout has been that the trial is/was rigged. I confess that I agree. But the same Democrats who for decades have themselves been claiming that the justice system is rigged – ‘it’s racist’; ‘it’s biased against the poor and illegal immigrants’; ‘it favours the rich’; ‘the district attorneys are dirty and trials aren’t fair’; the Democrat attacks on the system being rigged continuing on into the horizon – these same people now are indignant with Mr Trump’s detailed, point-by-point allegation that this case was a political hit job and rigged. President Biden explicitly said this about Trump’s allegation: ‘It’s reckless. It’s dangerous. It’s irresponsible for anyone to say it was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict.’ Of course Trump’s claim is not just about the verdict. It’s about bringing a charge so novel no one had ever seen it in a US court before. It’s about a prosecutor who signalled to one of the most left-wing voter pools in America that if they elected him he would make it his core mission to get Trump – and for context this same prosecutor has been busily reducing a huge percentage of indictable offences in Manhattan to misdemeanour charges (hence, in part, the Big Apple’s lawlessness) while Trump’s is the only one case where he’s done the opposite. It’s about a judge whose rulings were down-the-line for the prosecutor and whose daughter is high up in Biden fundraising circles. It’s about seconding the third-most senior Biden Department of Justice lawyer to New York to be the brains in this case. It’s about a never-before-seen gag order on the leading Republican candidate and making him attend trial every day just when campaigning is getting going. It’s about setting the sentencing hearing date just days before the Republican convention.

So no, it’s not remotely just a complaint about the verdict. That’s like saying Lech Wałęsa just didn’t like the verdicts against him in Soviet Poland. Ditto Vaclav Havel in the then Soviet Czechoslovakia.

For a while now I’ve been marvelling that the precarious defence of free speech around the Anglosphere and here in Australia owes more to an eccentric billionaire Elon Musk than to any supposedly right-of-centre politicians. (Reminder: all the recent speech-limiting Bills and legislation in Australia were first mooted and fleshed out by the Liberal party. It is misleading and deceptive conduct for today’s Liberal party to assert, as it does, that it’s the party of free speech. James Patterson and Tim Wilson should hang their heads in shame in my opinion. But that’s just my opinion.) But back to Mr Musk. He has come out strong and tweeted: ‘Great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system. If a former President can be criminally convicted over such a trivial matter – motivated by politics, rather than justice – then anyone is at risk of a similar fate’.

Spot on, Elon Musk. It’s (almost) enough to make me forgive your electric car dalliance.