Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is the principal opponent of the Biden regime, and the individual who at this point is most likely to be elected president in 2024. He has also been indicted on federal criminal charges related to the mishandling of classified documents, and is scheduled to be arrested on Tuesday.

Not too long ago, when Trump was arrested by the Manhattan DA on bogus felony charges, critics of the Biden regime began to say that America had become a banana republic. We’re racing past that stage now. America is heading toward becoming a new Stalinist regime in which critics of those in power are arrested by the regime itself, tried on false and fabricated charges, and executed.

The Left may not plan to murder Trump, but they’re certainly trying to execute him politically.

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As in all the other cases against Trump, this one couldn’t be flimsier. The New York Times says Trump is accused of “mishandling classified documents he kept upon leaving office and then obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them.” The Washington Free Beacon explained that “Trump has previously defended his retention of documents, suggesting he declassified them while president. However, Trump has not provided evidence of this, and his attorneys have declined to make that argument in court filings.”

The Espionage Act has been brought into play, giving the appearance, without any evidence whatsoever, that Trump collected classified documents and passed them to a foreign power.

Yet the rules regarding classified documents are not so clear-cut. Journalist Greg Price notes that “indicting Donald Trump under the Espionage Act for Mar-a-Lago documents would be a fully insane abuse of power that it’s hard to wrap your head around: First of all, the Espionage Act is an unconstitutional relic of World War I that was passed in order to criminalize dissent against the war. Second, it was signed into law decades before President Truman created the modern system of classification/declassification and so makes no reference to whether a document has been deemed classified. Instead, it makes it a crime to retain documents related to the national defense that could be used to harm the United States, which in the case of Donald Trump is whatever the DOJ and Jack Smith want it to be.”

What’s more, as Daniel Greenfield pointed out, Trump is being charged over what has been common practice for decades. NBC News reported that “every administration since President Ronald Reagan’s has mismanaged classified documents, according to National Archives and Records Administration officials.” And not just presidents: “Sen. Edmund Muskie, D-Maine — who left Congress in 1980 and was secretary of state in the last year of President Jimmy Carter’s administration — included 98 classified documents when his papers were given to Bates College.” And of course Old Joe Biden had classified documents strewn all over his garage, where his influence-peddling crackhead son and any of his Russian hookers had free and easy access to them.

But now Merrick Garland and his henchmen think they’ve found something they can use to destroy the principal foe of the regime, and so fairness, decency, common sense and impartial justice are out the window. Biden’s handlers are treating Trump the way Stalin treated the Old Bolsheviks whom he saw as rivals: he had them falsely accused, imprisoned, and executed. But Garland and the rest should take careful note: Bolshevik pioneers such as Nikolai Bukharin, Gregory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev had never actually been opponents of Stalin the way Trump is Biden’s opponent. They had been his friends, whom he turned against in his paranoia and destroyed in his quest for absolute power. They had helped install the authoritarian Communist regime in the Soviet Union, only to find themselves becoming its victims. It likely never occurred to them that someone could subject them to the same treatment they had meted out to so many others.

The question DeSantis and everyone else should be asking is whether this regime will even allow one of its opponents to enter the Oval Office.

But it could happen here, just as everything else we used to think couldn’t happen here is happening now. Now that the Justice Department has become a weapon of political vengeance, it could turn one day against the very people who are using it so ruthlessly today against Donald Trump. But right now, firmly ensconced in power, they can’t even envision a day when someone might displace them. This gang of criminals aims to be in power forever.

And so this is yet another dark day for the United States. Once again we see how few people with integrity there really are among today’s political movers and shakers. A notable exception was Ron DeSantis, who tweeted Thursday: “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all.”

The question DeSantis and everyone else should be asking is whether this regime will even allow one of its opponents to enter the Oval Office, or will engage in more brazen criminal activity to prevent that from happening.

Meanwhile, where are the patriotic Democrats who are likely appalled at the abandonment of the rule of law and the persecution of the nation’s foremost political opposition figure? Don’t keep a light on for them. Authoritarians tend to march in lockstep.

This piece was originally published by Front Page Magazine.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 26 books including many bestsellers, such as “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)“, “The Truth About Muhammad“ and “The History of Jihad.” His latest books are “The Critical Qur’an“ and “The Sumter Gambit.” Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.