A new book bashes the Democrats’ strategy of trading the ballot box for the courts.

It's about what's happening now: If they can’t win elections, they’ll drag Republicans in front of judges and into prison.

It’s horrendous, as spelled out in Alex Swoyer’s “Lawless Lawfare: Tipping the Scales of Justice to Get Trump and Destroy MAGA.”

The Washington Times legal affairs reporter’s tome is chock-full of sources detailing how liberals go scorched-earth when they can’t win elections.

Solitary confinement, bankruptcy, joblessness, censorship. Such are the aims that libs wish on conservatives who dare cheer Trump’s America First movement.

The only things missing are cattle cars for patriots, although you better believe Dems yearn to toss them in there.

Half a century ago, Democrats who couldn’t win on Election Day pulled lawfare on an equally grand scale. It was called Watergate. After President Richard Nixon won 49 states in 1972, Dems invented that scandal and ousted him two years later.

The brilliant author Ann Coulter called that for what it was: lawfare.

Now Swoyer swoops in with more evidence of the lib libel.

Swoyer quotes a battlefield of Trumpers.

Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law who as co-head of the Republican National Committee helped him win last year:

“I won’t even go into the personal side of this for us, which has affected our ability to get a loan for a house or a mortgage. … We all in the Trump family have been negatively impacted by what these people have tried to do in the name of politics.”

Donald Trump Jr. said that if his dad lost on Nov. 5, he was headed for jail.

“That was their goal … to have the optics of that to send it out as a warning to people out there: Don’t … be outspoken, because this is what could ultimately happen to you. … They knew the only way they could beat him wasn’t at the ballot box, but to jail him.”

MAGA mouthpiece Steve Bannon, jailed for four months for telling congressional Democrats to shove it:

“Anyone who goes into government now has to get their head examined, because it is so brutal what they do to you.”

Swoyer also exposes the jarring cost of loyalty to Trump.

Trade wiz Peter Navarro, shackled in leg irons last summer for refusing to knife the president, was robbed of $1.7 million amid the Jan. 6, 2021, hoax.

That was a pittance compared to the $146 million that Georgia Dems wanted to steal from America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, for questioning the stolen 2020 election.

John Eastman is the lawyer who advised Trump on how to fight the rigged ’20 vote. His cost?

“A barrage of lawsuits alongside the Georgia indictment,” writes Swoyer. “And he also lost his ability to practice law in the state of California after being punished by the state’s disciplinary board.”

Eastman:

“They are throwing out the rule of law to get Trump.”

Lawfare spreads well beyond White House politics. The cost in Texas is “immense,” said the Lone Star State’s attorney general, Ken Paxton.

“It is every day. It never stops. I’ve gone through, like six major things — from the SEC to three criminal indictments in the state, to the FBI investigating me for four years, to impeachment. … I have incurred over $16 million in legal defense. What they do is try to drain you financially, and then you have to say, ‘O.K., I am guilty’ — not because you are; because you can’t pay.”

The hardest sledgehammer against conservatives came after the J6 joke, with protesters slapped with horrid imprisonment. One victim was a young hairdresser who had recently become a Republican, Brandon Straka.

Swoyer writes: 

“Although he never went inside the Capitol building — nor committed any violence — he was charged by the feds with entering and remaining on restricted grounds, impeding a law enforcement officer and disorderly conduct.”

He was hit with federal supervision until Trump rode to the rescue by pardoning 1,500 other defendants — but not before

“I spent about $350,000 on lawyers and legal fees.”

Who’s the king of costs? Trump. “The president himself is facing more than $673 million in legal penalties” from bogus New York court howitzers, writes Swoyer.

Do leftists care about lawfare? Quite the opposite, says the author. “They kept pursuing it until it became overkill.”

Russiagate also served the libs’ purpose. Said Bannon:

“We never really got the America First policies implemented until essentially late in Trump’s first term. The deep state, their number one objective is to make sure you begin no program of deconstructing the administrative state. If you think about it, they did a pretty good job. … They definitely thwarted us on every element.”

The ultimate brainwashing came after the Jan. 6 march on the Capitol. Dems called it an attempted coup d'etat, when the only toppling involved their rigged election two months before, something the demonstrators suffered with sad sacrifice: Air Force vet Ashli Babbitt gunned down by the cop Michael Byrd and Trump impeached a second time even though he told his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” protest.

Trump continued to draw Dem muscle when President Joe Biden’s FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in 2022. Reason? Supposedly because the former president had classified papers that he had the legal right to hold.

Swoyer digs into another raid that year, this one targeting Mark Houck for “pushing an abortion clinic worker who was harassing his son.” The feds hit his Pennsylvania home. And after a jury freed him, he still felt the sting:

“I don’t want any other American citizen to have to experience that.”

But complain loudly? Not even Trump could, no thanks to court-ordered gag orders.

Lara Trump, writes Swoyer, “said the gag orders were horrible for him during the campaign. ‘It was very challenging. How is it you are able to go out and actually talk to the public and defend your reputation in the midst of what is a character assassination — and that is what that whole thing was about.’”

Swoyer, a Mizzou Tiger, roars in this book. After a teacher from her University of Missouri days whined about her being “a biased journalist,” she bellowed back: “When I went to the professor’s page, I saw nothing but negative posts about Trump. I realized my former professor had a case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Trump was just as loud on Twitter, revealing that President Barack Obama’s team spied on his 2016 campaign. Writes Swoyer, “It was one of the first examples of the media ignoring and failing to call out the lawfare against the president.”  

Also in early 2017 was the Russia hoax against Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The retired Army three-star general is still infuriated, writes Swoyer, and wants the president to shut down the FBI and CIA “to prevent the political weaponization of law enforcement.”

Flynn told the author, “I don’t think the FBI will ever recover. The CIA is vastly worse than the FBI — the true deep state is the CIA. If I was POTUS, I’d put the hardest-ass military leader in charge of it.”

Much worse than Flynn’s experience was that of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was thrown in prison for nearly a decade for supposed corruption before Trump commuted his sentence in 2020 and pardoned him this year.

Blagojevich told Swoyer,

“They took away from the people of Illinois the person that was blocking a big tax increase. I predicted once they got rid of me there was going to be a 60% income tax increase … and within months, they did that.”

He wants Trump to depoliticize federal police agencies, telling Swoyer, “This is the moment in our history where we are either going to save our democracy or we are going to lose it forever.”

Writes Swoyer, “He said lawfare — not Trump, as liberals have claimed — is the true threat to democracy, and that something must be done because one party will continue to use it against the other. That … could mean the end of free and fair elections.”

Trump overcame that threat, but it wasn’t easy.

As David Schoen, the president’s impeachment lawyer, told Swoyer,

“In the cases brought against Trump, it is literally as if the criminal justice system was hijacked by political enemies willing to go to any measure to ensure that Trump would never be president again.”

The same sentiment came from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who, writes Swoyer, “said the lawfare exploded against this president because of his popularity.”

“They don’t go a little bit in — they go in to ruin your life,” Paxton, who was almost bounced from office, told the author. “They want to take away your freedom, ruin your family, ruin you financially, [your] reputation — anything they can do to harm you. They literally hate you and want to destroy you. They don’t care about the rules and the law.”

Good news does abound. Swoyer writes that presidential son “Don Jr.  said this time, the Washington establishment and Democrats’ lawfare failed — at least for now — telling me that ‘it completely backfired. It only made my father strong, my family more resilient, and our country more and more aware of just how corrupt, chaotic, and divided the Democratic Party made this country.’”

By the time President Trump’s term is up, Swoyer might consider a sequel: “Awefare: How Trump Bunker-Busted the Dems’ Reign of Terror.”

Bucky Fox is an author and editor in Florida.

Image: Official portrait // public domain