As the left-wing establishment conducts the lawfare equivalent of carpet-bombing former President Donald Trump, aiming to render his presidential comeback aspirations burnt-out rubble by November 2024, it’s an interesting exercise to understand how these actions might be viewed in Beijing or Moscow.
In the West, generally, politicians usually just win or lose elections. If they lose, they simply return to private life, free to try again.
In nations lacking rule of law and fair elections — whether autocracies such as Russia or totalitarian states like China — the practice of politics is more akin to the sort of royal jockeying of the medieval era. Machiavelli’s The Prince is a manual on how to survive in this environment. “Game of Thrones” is an appropriate modern adaptation: poison, assassination, exile, disappearings, or official condemnation take the place of fair election contests.
Thus, Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping would both see the effort to use the government’s prosecutorial power against Trump as a standard tool in any dictator’s toolkit. As Lavrentiy Beria, Joseph Stalin’s secret police commissar said, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
But while Putin and Xi surely recognize the form, they likely mock its sloppy and slow execution — Trump is still a free man and he’s still running for president, an existential threat to the continuance of President Joe Biden’s remaining in the White House. For dictators used to removing their would-be competitors from the chessboard, the fact that Trump is
