“You’re confused, you think I’m on trial. … I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.” — Fulton County, Ga,, District Attorney Fani Willis

Well, let’s see, Ms. Willis. You’re on the witness stand, before a judge considering a motion to disqualify you from further pursuing your Trump-ed up case against Donald Trump

… dodging questions about a special prosecutor you hired, at a high rate of compensation, without obvious qualifications

… with whom you’ve had an intimate relationship and who has paid thousands of dollars for vacations you’ve taken to exotic locations 

… which you claim you reimbursed with cash from massive stashes lying around your house because you were so advised by your father

… who insisted that he did so counsel you because “it’s a black thing” 

… while further playing the race card by adding that unidentified protesters gathered outside your house and shouted the “N” word when you were somehow elected district attorney

… despite your supposed lack of awareness of such basic legal requirements as disclosing conflicts of interest familiar to any first-year law student not absent the day they taught Ethics in Ethics class.

As they say: if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and waddles to the witness stand like a duck, it’s a duck.

Yes, Ms. Willis. You looked, talked, and acted very much like someone on trial. For your reputation. For your continued participation in the case. For your future as district attorney. And potentially for charges of – how appropriate – making and filing false statements. 

But you are also deservedly on trial in the court of public opinion based on an even bigger abuse than hiring your boyfriend: your outlandish, outrageous, and out-of-bounds misapplication of an anti-racketeering statute to target a former president for exercising his First Amendment rights to question a highly questionable election result.

Along with 18 co-defendants, one of whom heroically put his life on the line in deploying the federal version of the same statute as intended, against five New York City mob families – a defining moment in a career as distinguished as yours is apparently now extinguished.

How abusive is your unprecedented RICO indictment, which sweeps in non-criminal actions outside the state of Georgia, much less Fulton County? Convictions would reportedly result in mandatory five-year sentences with no possibility of pardon or parole under Georgia law.

Moreover, Madame District Attorney, you’re not the only one on trial in this respect. The last few weeks’ news underscores how an entire cohort of Trump tormentors is deservedly in the people’s dock.

For the equally unparalleled stretching of another state’s anti-consumer fraud statute to cripple Trump and his family financially through a half-billion dollar fine, despite no victims in sight.

For a decision greenlighting a trial on the yet farther-fetched notion that a supposed federal election crime not pursued by the Federal Election Commission can be a required predicate for 34 counts of “falsifying business records” under a state law.

For a selective prosecution on 31 counts under the Espionage Act for “willful retention” of classified documents – the same charge levied against the counterfeit incumbent, whose wrongdoing “spanned (his) career,” yet who nevertheless earns a “get-out-of-jail-free pass” (to coin a phrase) for being a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

For the deeply “troubling” – if not altogether unhinged – assertion that in pressing well-founded election-fraud concerns and potential remedies, the previous president was “conspiring to defraud the United States,” whatever that means.

It’s no wonder that other perpetrators of these serial judicial bombardments have been equally defensive, albeit in different forms. New York Attorney General Letitia James, the mini-mind behind the maxi-fine, obscured her weak position by going over the top, bloviating, “The scale and the scope of Donald Trump’s fraud is staggering … and so too is his ego.”

Staggering? As staggering as the judicial overreach that one noted commentator called “grotesque” and “obscene”?

Not to be outdone in papering over pitiful legal positioning, Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith earlier this month took the “unusual” or “unorthodox step,” as journalists termed it, of turning his response to President Trump’s requests for discovery into a 67-page non-denial denial that the “defrauding case” was “politically motivated.” The less-genteel investigative reporter Julie Kelly called it a “temper tantrum” – one that didn’t prevent Smith’s efforts to quash discovery from being rejected.

Interestingly, amid all the “doth-protest-too-much” posturing, one figure this week didn’t look like he’s on trial: the defendant. 

One would expect a person asked to hand over half a billion big ones in a non-fraud fraud case and an astounding $83 million for “defaming” a fabulist former sex columnist, plus facing multiple lifetimes in prison, to appear bitter or broken – breaking him being the intent of this full-court (literally) coordinated response.

(Oh? Not coordinated, Fani? Your special prosecutor boyfriend visited the White House before your indictment was announced as part of his six-continent tour?)

Instead, in a town hall this week with Fox’s Laura Ingraham, The Donald came across as measured, distinguished (unlike you, Ms. Willis) and – dare one utter it without being dubbed an “insurrectionist?” – presidential.

In particular, addressing the self-created impression that a second term would be about retribution, the 45th chief executive delivered the line of the campaign to date: “My revenge will be success.”

That’s the brand of optimism hungered for by a nation exhausted by inflation, border chaos, dictatorial identity politics, and unceasing wars around the globe – not to mention at home against this administration’s political opponents. It’s a fully credible pledge given the real (pre-COVID) achievements of Trump’s too-short term in office.

The only success you and your Get-Trump team have delivered of late, Ms. Willis, is to destroy Americans’ faith in the justice system and probably, your career. Fortunately, your performance last week, and the former president’s Tuesday, increase the chances that you won’t succeed in your crusade to destroy Mr. Trump.

Bob Maistros is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.