Calling Donald Trump a threat to the rule of law has backfired

To President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and his “MAGA Republican extremists” are a threat to “the very foundations of our republic”. Democrats once insisted that prosecuting Mr Trump for his conduct as president would illuminate his menace and bar him from the office. For their part, federal prosecutors have never given a hint of partisan objectives; they wanted to vindicate the principle that no one is above the law.

As Mr Trump acquires the Republican presidential nomination for a third time, these political and legal aspirations are disintegrating. Prosecuting Mr Trump boosted him politically. It rallied Republicans to him in the primaries and, perversely, helped him redirect the very charge that he threatened democracy to Mr Biden by falsely claiming the president was “weaponising” the Department of Justice. And, as of this month, prosecuting Mr Trump has resulted in a new constitutional standard that presidents can, in fact, forever be uniquely beyond the reach of the law. The political and legal consequences are converging to probably make Mr Trump—now the victim of that most antidemocratic of acts, an attempted assassination—the first president to begin a term with this new understanding of unassailable executive power.