Willis wrong to use church address for political purposes

I regret that Big Bethel AME Church allowed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to use a religious service for political purposes to defend her alleged misconduct. That alleged misconduct led to the current hearing before the Fulton County Superior Court to remove her from the excellent role she has served in the case against Donald Trump and his colleagues for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

Kudos to Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for resisting the intervention of Trump and his lackeys.

I watched a video of Willis’ “church speech,” which struck me as a blatant expression of hypocrisy and entitlement. ROBERT BROWN,

ATLANTA

About 18 months ago, Donald Trump suffered one of his worst political defeats, when many of his loyalists and hand-picked candidates were defeated in a midterm landscape that clearly favored the Republicans. A lot of people — I was one of them — thought that might be the beginning of the end for him.

Instead, Trump arguably occupies a more politically commanding position in American politics today than at any other point in the past eight years. His romp through Super Tuesday completed the replay of 2016’s Republican primaries, with his opposition once again fatally divided and his coalition this time much stronger from the start.

How did we go from defeat and apparent weakness to recovery and strength? Start with the most important political result of the Republican disappointments in 2022, which was not the temporary blow to Trump but the brief return of Biden’s mojo, preempting any effort within the liberal coalition to make an issue of his age and push him out for 2024.

Sticking with Biden didn’t just mean that Democrats were stuck with apparent presidential decrepitude to go along with an unpopular economic record. It also meant that the argument among Republicans for Trump’s unelectability, briefly potent enough to lift Ron DeSantis in the polls, fizzled out quickly.

There is an understandable liberal frustration with all attempts to make Trumpism out to be some kind of unbeatable political force, given how many bruising defeats he and his allies have suffered at the ballot box. But there is a clear pattern where you can’t expect to beat Trump except at the ballot box — because all the attempts to investigate, impeach and prosecute just don’t have the desired political effect.

Obviously Trump is corrupt, and some of the proceedings against him have merit. But far too often these efforts end up tainted by nakedly partisan intent. Prosecutors could have brought one slam-dunk indictment against the former president, in the classified-documents case. Instead, they brought four of them.

Meanwhile, we’ve also had the strange swell of enthusiasm for a 14th Amendment solution to the Trump problem, his removal from the ballot via state officialdom or judicial diktat. The effort was antidemocratic and incompetent, leading to an entirely foreseeable Supreme Court rebuke.

So Trump has risen by being fortunate, once again, in his rivals and enemies. But he’s also risen by doing something a bit more unaccustomed: ceding the spotlight and showing a touch of actual political discipline.

He refused to be goaded onto the primary debate stage, whether by Haley, Chris Christie or his former vice president. He has somewhat normal political professionals running his campaign. He’s kept his more bizarre rants confined to the weird microworld of Truth Social instead of making a triumphant return to a larger social media platform. He’s done fewer rallies, made fewer headlines with his insults and backed off from some fights that might have run for weeks in the past.

This isn’t a “new Trump,” exactly: His rally speeches are still rambling and rich with grievance, and you just need to take a glance at Truth Social to see the old mania at work.

But whether there’s a real strategy or not, his current position clearly vindicates the rule of the Trump era that the lower his profile, the higher his polls.

This is the one part of the Trumpian revival that I think should give the Biden campaign some degree of comfort for the fall campaign. In general, the White House seems to be in a dangerous kind of denial about its parlous position, trying to wish away the clear message of the polling averages. But to the extent that Trump thrives when he’s getting less attention, you would expect a general election campaign to provide many more reminders of his chaos and unfitness to the voters who just aren’t paying close attention now.