(WND News Center)—For years already, Democrats and other leftists in America have orchestrated a multi-level lawfare campaign against President Trump.
Even while he was president they made wild claims that he orchestrated an “insurrection” against the nation even though the events were just a protest that got out of hand, and even though those charges weren’t filed. Nor did they succeed in their two failed attempts to impeach him and remove him from office, even once after he had left office.
But they made claims about business records misdemeanors that were now felonies for Trump, there were paper custody violations that generated a host of felonies against Trump even though almost identical violations by Joe Biden and Mike Pence were dismissed as not worthy of prosecution. They’ve even alleged he ran a corrupt criminal organization to overturn the 2020 election.
They’ve run into headwinds with valid arguments that their special prosecutor was appointed illegally, and the Supreme Court ruling presidents are immune to many claims based on their actions in office.
But now a commentator at Fox News is warning they’re about to ramp up their war against Trump to the nuclear level, ordering him to jail.
It is commentator Andrew McCarthy who is warning that the judge in the business records case, characterized by Trump critics throughout as a “hush money” complaint, already has signaled his intent to impose a jail sentence.
The case involved Trump’s payments to a woman to keep quiet about an “affair” the two were alleged to have had – even though both have denied it.
Those payments were characterized as legal expenses, since the payments were made through a lawyer. Much like Hillary Clinton characterized as legal expenses her payments during the 2016 race to a legal team which in turn hired someone to make up salacious allegations against Trump in what has become known as the Steele dossier, a series of debunked claims.
The judge, Juan Merchan, has refused to step away from the case even though there’s an obvious appearance of a conflict of interests as his daughter, a Democrat campaign activist, has been making money off the decisions her father makes in the courtroom against Trump.
“To the surprise of no one, Judge Juan Merchan has yet again denied former President Donald Trump’s motion that the judge recuse himself. I am speaking, of course, about the case in which Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district Attorney, Alvin Bragg, is prosecuting Trump. In early June, a jury found the former president and current GOP presidential nominee guilty on 34 counts of business-records falsification ” the commentary started.
“It is not just that Judge Merchan had previously denied the recusal motion. The judge has signaled that, come hell or high water, he intends to sentence Trump on September 18. If you’re keeping score, that would be two days after early voting in the 2024 election begins in Pennsylvania,” he said.
Trump’s lawyers have ammunition for their requests but McCarthy said this is no ordinary case.
“On July 1, the U.S. Supreme Court held that presidents (including former presidents) are (a) presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for any official acts taken as president, and (b) absolutely immune if the official acts are core constitutional duties of the chief executive. The Court instructed that this immunity extends not only to charges but to evidence. That means prosecutors are not just barred from alleging official presidential acts as crimes; they are further prohibited from even using such acts as proof offered to establish other crimes,” he explained.
He explained there is no doubt Bragg’s case used “Trump’s official acts” to support their claims.
“Unsurprisingly then, Trump’s lawyers moved post-trial to have the guilty verdicts thrown out based on the high court’s immunity ruling,” he noted.
Merchan has said he’ll issue his ruling soon.
“Most importantly, though, Merchan admonished the parties to prepare for the court to move ahead with the imposition of sentence on September 18. He instructed the lawyers to submit promptly any arguments they intend to make on that subject,” McCarthy said.
The logical conclusion is that Merchan already has decided to reject Trump’s immunity arguments, and there is “a high likelihood that he will impose a prison sentence against Trump right after that.”
McCarthy explained, “I suspect that Merchan will rationalize that Trump (a) was not charged based on official presidential acts, and (b) would have been convicted even if Bragg’s prosecutors had not introduced arguably immunized evidence. Such a ruling might be wrong, especially on the latter point (at trial, prosecutors described some of the testimony from Trump staffers as ‘devastating’); but Merchan made so many outrageous rulings in the case that it would be foolish to expect him to change course now.”
Additionally, he said there’s another defense Trump’s lawyers can use on appeal: that Merchan refused Trump the right to a unanimous jury decision on the evidence.
McCarthy noted the Supreme Court has affirmed “in criminal cases, important proof elements affecting the potential sentence must be found unanimously by the jury,” a right that Merchan refused to allow Trump.
That’s critical because “a unanimous verdict on the supposed crime (conspiracy to influence the election by illegal conduct)” was what “Bragg alleged Trump was trying to conceal by falsifying his business records. That crime is what turned a misdemeanor into a felony, and what allowed Bragg to get around the two-year misdemeanor statute of limitations.”
He said the main point is that Bragg’s prosecution was politics.
“That’s why we call it ‘lawfare.’ The prosecutors and judge are not concerned about whether convictions ultimately get thrown out on appeal. And it’s not like Merchan is actually going to put Trump in prison; it is virtually certain that Trump will get bail pending appeal, so Merchan can appear to impose a stiff incarceration sentence without any real incarceration – at least for now, and probably ever.”
He said what the Democrats want out of their potpourri of wild claims is “to enable Vice President Harris and the media-Democratic complex to label Trump ‘a convicted felon sentenced to prison’ just weeks before Election Day.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
