Threatening to Prosecute Your Opponents When They Give Up Power Is a Bad Idea

All the Democrats out there announcing that as soon as they get power, they're going to use the full weight of government to prosecute anybody who had anything to do with the Donald Trump administration reminds me of a historical analogue. They won't recognize it because most of them don't believe that history started until 1619, or maybe when Barack Obama got elected, and anything occurring before then was just dead white men doing dead white men stuff that doesn't matter. But you know, it totally matters whether they like it or not.

So, there was once this guy, and he was a future dead white man, but go with me on this anyway. His name was Julius Caesar – you may have heard of him, or you may have gone to public school and one of our prestigious colleges, and therefore, you don't know who he was. Well, he was a Roman nobleman without much money to start, but he was smart and a very good general, and he accumulated a lot of power, both political and military. In doing so, he made many enemies, especially among the establishment. Anyway, he decided he was going to go to Gaul – that's France, before all they did was make cheese and surrender – to conquer it. As a proconsul, a kind of governor/general, he had what was called "imperium" – the power to rule – and a bunch of legions to go with it. And boy, did those legionnaires ever conquer. They did not use their words. They used their swords. It was all very manly. And they didn't have any Twitter lawyers telling them they were committing war crimes by winning. We have much to learn from the Romans, and no wonder real men think of them several times a day.

Anyway, as their commander, Caesar got very, very rich and very, very powerful. So far, so good. Well, his enemies back in Rome began to get nervous because he was a political threat to them, so they began to demand that he put down his imperium and return to Rome. Now, one of the many nice things about being a proconsul is that a proconsul is immune to prosecution. But as soon as Caesar gave up his imperium, well, it was open season on him in the courts his enemies controlled, and they made no bones about it. They were going to prosecute him and either impoverish and exile him or outright kill him.     

A proconsul had to lay down his imperium before he re-entered Italy, which meant giving up his legions. The border of Italy was a small creek called the Rubicon – you may have heard of it, again, if you didn't go to public school or one of our prestigious colleges. So, Julius Caesar had a choice. Either put down his imperium and come back to Rome to get completely screwed, or come back to Rome with his legions to do the screwing. Guess what he did? He crossed the Rubicon, there was a civil war that he won, and the rest is history.

So, there's a historical precedent about why it's a really bad idea to tell your heavily armed opponent that as soon as he gives up power, you're going to clap him in irons. But that's what's happening now. They have made it clear that once we give up power, should we lose the 2028 election, they're going to do everything they can to make sure that we don't ever get it back. Again, this is not speculation. We know this because they say so. We also know because they tried it before.

Sure, the pardon power – which they hate and will seek to undermine – will allow Trump to protect some of his people with blanket pardons, but how effective will that be? Should they pack the Supreme Court – again, something far outside the norms that they have promised to do because the existence of Trump relieves them from complying with any norms, rules, laws, or other guardrails – it is easy to see a future SCOTUS simply negating Trump's pardons because it's Trump. Regardless, pardons won't protect our people against being framed for something not covered by a blanket pardon. We saw that being framed is one of their go-to moves. They're essentially going to outlaw us having power. They try to do that under Joe Biden, but his being an eggplant and his minions not being competent communists, they failed to do that effectively. They tried. Oh, did they try. But they didn't quite pull it off. Don't expect them to make the same mistake this time. This time they're playing for keeps.

You might scoff, but there's precedent for this going on right in front of you today. Over in England, the grossly unpopular leftist regime has outlawed free speech and is about to ban the right to jury trials in order to maintain power. Helping them are other people in the establishment, including Tories, who desperately want to stop the Reform Party from having any kind of say, even though polls show these upstarts have a plurality of support. Look at Germany, that bastion of freedom. Again, the AfD, the party with the plurality of support, has been effectively locked out of any power despite the way that the government is designed for proportional representation to let every freakish political minority have a say. Ditto France.

Basically, the leftist establishments across the globe are attempting to hold onto power by excluding citizens who reject their corruption, failure, and embrace of perversions under the excuse that these populists – note that Julius Caesar was a populist leader of his era – are so outside the mainstream that they have no right to participate in their own governance. Now, in garbage countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the rest, that's easy to do. Their people are weak, soft, stupid, and love their Eurovision Song Contest, and also gave up their guns. We haven't given up our guns. That's very, very important because our government does not retain a monopoly on violence. The people do.

So, do I think this is all going to evolve into a civil war? I've written about that before, and my new book – "Panama Red," the ninth Kelly Turnbull adventure – takes place in a future where America has agreed to split into red and blue countries sitting uncomfortably next to each other. Is secession possible? I used to think it was far-fetched that the United States might tear itself apart, but the more I see the Left totally embracing the complete hatred of normal people as its core policy, I'm beginning to think that maybe we aren't going to be able to stay together. Do you want to share your country with people who think it's cool to mutilate kids to please their Munchausen mommies, to import Third World sociopaths to feed at our welfare troughs, and to hassle, oppress, and discriminate against the people who founded, feed, fuel, and defend this country? Hell no.

Maybe we will break apart. It's becoming hard to justify remaining in a country with people who despise us, as well as exploit us. But that's not good. I saw what happened when a country's people turned on each other after I had to go to Kosovo to help pick up the pieces of their civil war. Let me give you a spoiler here. It's very, very bad.

But these threats to immediately prosecute Republicans, not for committing crimes but for embracing policies that the Left doesn't like, can't be ignored. This isn't justice. They don't even make a case for it being justice. It's pure power. The problem with pure power is that, as their own team in the form of Chairman Mao used to say, power comes out of the barrel of a gun. At the end of the day, if you want to rule by power, you'd better have most of the guns. As citizens, we do. That's why they placed their hope into weaponizing our armed forces against us – remember Grandpa Badfinger babbling about using F-16s to bomb patriotic Americans? Why do you think the Left is so desperate to prevent Pete Hegseth from finishing his work turning the Pentagon from a petri dish of bizarre social pathologies back into a military organization? The Left tried to shape the officer corps through the power of DEI and selecting for the socialist-inclined – you need to understand that active-duty senior officers are not usually conservative in the sense that we're conservative, but are often big-government socialists who believe in telling the people what they want rather than listening to them. This is why they're terrified of Pete Hegseth. He's promoting warfighters instead of civil war fighters, guys the Left could rely on to be there to help when the color revolution comes. Do you think for one minute Mark Milley wouldn't have turned the Army on us for being uppity?

Yeah, I know, that's crazy talk, which is crazy, and stop being crazy, you crazy guy. But then again, I'm not the one out there threatening to prosecute anybody who participates in any policy that the Democrats don't like. I'm just the guy who notices. Luckily, the Trump administration has noticed too, and it's not playing along. It's not giving in. It's not backing down. Nor should we as citizens play along, give in, or back down. Our enemies are evil, but they're also stupid, and they don't understand human nature, nor do they know history. They somehow think that they can intimidate us and shame us into submission, into giving up our right to participate in our own governance and allowing them to rule over us in perpetuity. That's not going to happen. That's not in the cards. They're playing a very dangerous game.

Now, Julius Caesar was famously kind to his enemies. He showed mercy to most of the people who opposed him during the Roman Civil War he fought and won. Of course, it was the same people he showed mercy to who ended up stabbing him to death. That's another lesson of history, but one that we need to learn. And when we learn it, it's not going to go well for the enemies who force us to protect ourselves from the oppression they promise to impose upon us.

But there's hope. It's not too late to not repeat history. I'm just not optimistic that the Left is not so dumb and malicious that it will stumble into a catastrophe.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2025/12/08/threatening-to-prosecute-your-opponents-when-they-give-up-power-is-a-bad-idea-n2667461