Democrats have denied that their serial attempts to imprison former President Donald Trump and a long list of his former aides, political allies and supporters amount to an illegal campaign of political lawfare. But how else do you describe President Joe Biden’s shocking demand this week that “we gotta lock him (Donald Trump) up”?

Of course, immediately after saying it, Biden even in his attenuated mental state realized he had said something horribly wrong. So he backtracked, auto-erased his initial comment and said, “politically lock him up.” Which of course is a non-sequitur.

Lock him up for what? Does it really matter? As the Queen said in Alice In Wonderland, “Sentence first — verdict afterwards!” Biden and his allies just want Trump to go away. For a long time, if possible.

The point is, the goal of lawfare isn’t justice. It’s political. Raw politics of furthest-left kind, first used by the Chinese communists, then exported to leftist governments across Latin America. American leftists have embraced the idea with fervor, in particular the idea of using government to censor and silence your political foes.

“A recent report by the House Judiciary Committee drew striking parallels from Brazil’s censorship regime to the Biden administration’s actions urging social media platforms to censor Democratic rival Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or silence critics like Tucker Carlson,” wrote Joseph Humire, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “These actions undermine the rule of law and weaken America’s moral standing at home and throughout the Americas.”

All can now see the Democrats’ endgame here. Trump has been rising in the polls, while Vice President Kamala Harris has been falling. Indeed, Trump right now stands a good chance of winning, as both recent polls and betting web sites show.

After four years of nonstop vilification of Trump for the Jan. 6 demonstrations at the Capitol, don’t be surprised if the Democrats and their far-left allies go bonkers if Trump wins the presidency again.

Expect riots, property destruction and physical intimidation by enraged lefties. After all, following the 2020 summer of rioting, killing and mayhem set off by the death of George Floyd, Democrats sat on the sidelines and applauded the chaos.

But if Trump loses, don’t be surprised if he’s quickly arrested and put behind bars following an appearance before an Obama- or Biden-appointed judge.

Why? Clearly not for reasons of justice. No, it will serve as an intimidating lesson to any other Trump-like populists who might want to carry on his movement to take back power from big government and restore people’s basic constitutional rights.

So, J.D. Vance, watch your back.

And also, you dear reader should watch your back, as well. The left means to silence you, whether you’re in the middle, the right, libertarian or just a plain ol’ populist American who wants everyone to get a fair shake

After all, the whole purpose of lawfare is to use the law as a political weapon. Our Constitution, which Democrats loathe, guarantees an independent judiciary. But the far-left is doing all in its power to destroy that, starting in law schools teaching Critical Legal Studies (a close cousin of the equally awful Critical Race Theory), appointing biased judges, encouraging tendentious readings of the law, and straight-up politicizing of courts.

Nor does it end there. The entire bureaucracy is now riddled with Obama and Biden appointees who have weaponized our government in ways that are inimical to our republican form of government — but especially by limiting free-speech rights.

Without free speech, the very idea of “democracy” becomes a joke, and our republic, the most successful in human history, is dead.

Democrats and other leftists alike throw the “F-word” around a lot these days. The word, of course, is “fascist.” But the first thing both fascists and leftists do upon gaining power (they are, after all, two sides of the same ideological coin) is attack their foes through the justice system, jail them, and censor all media.

We ask, given what we know of Democrats’ rhetoric and behavior over the past four years, who really fits that description?

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board