Within 24 hours of former President Donald Trump’s arrest on 34 overhyped felony counts related to hush-money payments made to conceal an extramarital dalliance, his re-election campaign raised $4 million, and he widened his lead in the Republican primaries to almost 30 percentage points. Yet a CNN poll also found that 60 percent of Americans approve of the indictment. These numbers are probably less important than they might appear. The trial will likely mobilize the base in both parties and pull swing voters in both directions—for a net effect of zero.

Even so, the indictment does real harm to the American body politic. It has already set off another Trump-centric media feeding frenzy, at the expense of issues far more serious than the former executive’s half-remembered infidelities, and it creates a dangerous precedent, further politicizing the judiciary and inviting escalation. Above all, it is a reminder that Trump has been investigated, impeached, and indicted not because of the crimes of which he is accused, but because he has dared to oppose the imperial foreign policy favored by elites.

Fans of the indictment insist that no man is above the law, not every case creates a precedent, and other countries indict their leaders. For example, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to jail, and France is still a democracy. But the Trump indictment is of a piece with other developments that should be cause for worry. Just to name one example, a few weeks before the former president’s arrest, Internal Revenue Service agents visited the home of journalist Matt Taibbi while he was testifying at a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The IRS’s visit to the home of a prominent critic of the establishment on the same day he was testifying about government overreach is a highly unusual occurrence, and almost seems like the Biden administration flipping the bird to its critics. Outrageously, the mainstream and left media by and large have ignored the IRS bullying of Taibbi. Federal law enforcement has long been deployed in blatantly political ways against the activist left. Heterodox critics like Taibbi are now also targets, and there is ample evidence that it is also being wielded against the MAGA right.

The Trump arrest is an act of sheer desperation, based on a tortured legal theory that seeks to turn mislabeled payments into federal election meddling. It should force us to ask once again: Why do they hate Trump so much? Alvin Bragg’s prosecution is part and parcel of a multifront war waged against the former president by the entire US establishment and its institutions. While in the White House, Trump gave the ruling class massive tax cuts and sweeping deregulation, so what’s the beef? His foreign-policy heresies. To the frustration of those who benefit from it, Trump worked to unwind the American empire. Indeed, he has done more to restrain the US imperium than any politician in 75 years.

Within a few months of his arrival in the Oval Office, it became clear that Trump’s seemingly preposterous rhetoric about ending America’s “forever wars” wasn’t a joke. Yes, he ordered a few missile and drone strikes here and there, but unlike all of his recent predecessors, he didn’t start any new wars. Indeed, he wound down numerous small wars and negotiated a peace settlement in Afghanistan, even if the dirty work of the final withdrawal fell to President Biden.

By early summer 2017, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had become so worried that they held a meeting with Trump at the Pentagon at which they attempted to explain how America’s informal empire functions. Trump didn’t dig the presentation. Calling his generals “dopes and babies” and “losers,” he demanded to know why the United States wasn’t receiving free oil from the Middle East. “We spent $7 trillion; they’re ripping us off.… Where is the fucking oil?” After the meeting, Trump continued to take an executive-branch-sized hammer to the elaborate political, diplomatic, economic, and military architecture of US global hegemony.

Trump’s assault on the foreign-policy status quo is all the more remarkable for the near total lack of literature discussing it. Here is a very brief sketch of what he did: Trump ordered the withdrawal of one-third of all US military personnel from Germany, which is a central fulcrum for the entire American imperial project. The 40 German military installations housing US troops support American military operations in 104 countries and contain an estimated 150 nuclear weapons; among other projects, the military’s Africa Command is headquartered in Germany. Trump also ordered the Pentagon to explore withdrawing troops from South Korea, which plays a similar role to that of Germany as a central, high-tech node of US power projection throughout the entire East-Asian region.

Trump likewise drew down the US military role in Syria, even as the foreign-policy establishment urged him to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. He withdrew troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, refused to escalate in Libya, and withdrew almost all US special forces from Somalia. In the rest of Africa, he mused about closing all US embassies—important nodes of Central Intelligence Agency operations…..

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