Trump’s battle against the tyranny of lawfare

A buzzword of the moment is “lawfare.” What is lawfare? It’s one of those portmanteau words that Lewis Carroll taught us about. A combination of “law” and “warfare,” “lawfare” is distinctly less clever an invention than “chortle” – one of Carroll’s coinages, my beamish boy, which combines the words “chuckle” and “snort.”

The word “lawfare” apparently dates back to the late 1950s, though the phenomenon – using and abusing the law in order to conduct political warfare – has come into its own only in the past couple of decades. The fact that there is now an eponymous website devoted to the subject is but one patent of its currency.

Donald Trump has to be one of the most punished people in American history

We are supposed to deplore lawfare as a perversion or misapplication of the law. Which it is. But the temperature and asperity of public disapproval varies widely depending on who is directing the process. In part, it is a matter of political coloration. If you are on the side conducting the lawfare, you are likely to describe the process as a “no-one-is-above-the-law” form of accountability. If you are on the receiving end, you are likely to point out the partisan and selective nature of the assault. Given the political biases of our establishment culture, lawfare directed at Donald Trump and his allies earns an automatic quota of indulgence. It is excused, or half excused, as at least an attempt to pursue justice, to find “truth.”

Lawfare prosecuted by Trump and his allies, however, finds itself instantly saddled with morally charged obloquy. Two wrongs, you will have often heard, do not make a right. It was unseemly of Joe Biden & Co. to go after Trump and those in his orbit – but Trump’s response, we are told, is simply appalling. The swishing sound you hear in the background is the word “retribution” being dusted off and prepped for prime time.

Kimberley Strassel, writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, provided one version of this line of argument. Trump “insisted that his ‘retribution’ would be through winning office and making ‘our country successful.’ Conservatives in particular were eager to see the President remove the Justice Department from the political sphere. That hope is out the window seven months in.”

I wonder whether the history of actual warfare might be more illuminating. When the Germans decided to start World War One, their plan of attack, formulated by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, called for them to mount a lightning assault against France through Belgium and the Netherlands. The plan called for the Germans to destroy the French army and occupy Paris within 40 days.

Then came the first battle of the Marne early in September 1914. “The Miracle on the Marne” halted the German advance. It also condemned Europe to four years of attritional warfare that left millions dead and large swaths of France in ruins.

The Democrats had their own Schlieffen plan to be used against Trump after 2020.  They would conduct what amounted to a Blitzkrieg of total lawfare against him. Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, commanded one division. Alvin Bragg, District Attorney in New York City, commanded a second. Special Counsel Jack Smith, who went after Trump in Florida and in Washington, DC, commanded two others.

If the process is the punishment in legal proceedings, as we are often reminded, Trump has to be one of the most punished people in American history. But it is worth remembering that the aim of the lawfare was not simply to punish Trump but to destroy him. It was a multi-front assault. Bankruptcy loomed on one front, jail on another. Then came at least two assassination attempts, not officially part of the lawfare, but spiritually adjacent.

The Kaiser miscalculated when he went to war in Europe. I think that the battalions of anti-Trump activists, in the media and our political establishment as well as in the law, miscalculated when they took up arms against Trump. His response has not been to dig trenches and hunker down. What he has done resembles the D-Day invasion of Normandy more than the pointless slaughter of the Somme or Verdun.

Anti-Trump commentators are up in arms because the President has stormed the beaches of the Deep State and overrun many of its defensive positions. They skirl hysterically when he fires a governor of the Federal Reserve (“But she’s the first black woman to hold the position!”). Trump removes Secret Service protection for Kamala Harris. “A petty, vindictive move from a small man,” quoth a group called “Republicans Against Trump.” But then it turns out that Harris enjoyed the posse longer than any former vice-president in history.

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton wakes up to find his home and office raided by the FBI. “Retribution” screams the anti-Trump press. But then it turns out the FBI had been investigating Bolton at least since the Biden administration, which eventually shut down the inquiry – possibly, just possibly, because Bolton was such a vocal anti-Trump critic. Two separate magistrates, one in DC, one in Maryland, approved the FBI search warrants. Why? Because, as the New York Times grudgingly acknowledged, data gathered from the spy service of an “adversarial country” included “sensitive,” i.e., classified, information that Bolton, “while still working in the first Trump administration, appeared to have sent to people close to him on an unclassified system.”

The list goes on. The Dems perfected lawfare and unleashed it against Trump under the twin assumptions that it would succeed and that the Republicans would never retaliate in kind. Trump has upended both assumptions. Which is why I believe that what Trump is doing is not a matter of “retribution” or lawfare. It is a battle of liberation from the tyranny of lawfare.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.