Donald Trump has become the first former U.S. president to be indicted, and the Democrats have a clear electoral strategy in doing so. Historian Victor Davis Hanson sets that aside to argue for the existential threat this presents to our Republic.

He begins by laying out six observations from “most legal experts, Left and Right.” One of them is this:

No former president has ever been indicted — and for good reason. Such prosecutions would be viewed as persecutions and render all former presidents veritable targets of every publicity-hungry and politically hostile local, state, or federal prosecutor. They would reduce the presidency to Third World norms. Gratuitously prosecuting former presidents would become a political tool to harm the opposing political party or to tarnish the legacy of a former president.

The others largely have to do with how specific hatred of Trump overcame everything else.

Hanson goes on to list an astounding “sample of 20” crimes that Trump did not commit “that others did with either impunity or without being arrested.” They include Hillary Clinton’s email fiasco and her creation of the entire Russia-collusion hoax, as well as Bill Clinton’s various actions surrounding his philandering. They also include Joe Biden’s actions regarding his son Hunter Biden, as well as his careless and deceitful handling of classified documents. There are others, but those are the biggest ones.

What are we to make of these radical disparate applications of laws and protocols? The Left repeatedly breaks laws and long-held customs with impunity by weaponizing federal offices and bureaus, whether defined in the legal sphere by mostly exempting 120 days of mass rioting, looting, arson, mayhem, and lethal violence in the summer of 2020, or procedurally by denying the House minority leader the right to nominate his party members to committees, or ceremonially having the speaker of the House tear up the presidential State-of-the-Union Address on national television.

By any fair application of past tradition and the law, Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas should be impeached for their deliberate efforts to subvert U.S. immigration law for political purposes. By any just measure, Joe Biden should be the target of a special counsel’s investigation to ascertain how and why the Biden family received hidden funds from foreign governments and whether Biden himself paid taxes on such large sums.

It is the revolutionary Left that attacks institutions deemed unhelpful for its current political agenda — one that rarely warrants 50 percent public approval — whether that effort is defined by threats of ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding two more states, packing the court, or radically changing balloting laws and customs to turn elections into a 70 percent no-show of voters on Election Day.

He concludes:

All of the above is predicated on a simple premise: Were the opposition to match tit-for-tat these Democratic means, then the republic would quickly descend into a spiral of illegality and chaos analogous to what ended the late Roman Republic. That fact is well known to the new hard-left Democratic Party.

Read the whole thing here.