Imagine the person you had already decided to vote for in the next election — the leader your side trusts most, the one whose name you would put on a ballot without a second thought. Not a fringe figure. Not someone caught enriching himself or credibly accused of ordering a killing on a street corner. Imagine waking to the news that they will not be on that ballot at all, because a court has decided that the ordinary business of governing — a contract signed, a subsidy approved, a program launched, a budget enacted — was in fact a crime and has sent them to prison for it and barred them from public life for good.

Hold that person in your mind, whoever they are. For half the country it is a Democrat; for the other half a Republican. That is precisely the point. Every leader who has actually governed leaves behind a record of contestable decisions — the substance of governing is nothing but contestable decisions — and any of them can later be reread by a motivated prosecutor and an obliging court, not as policy but as felony. The machinery does not care who you voted for. It needs only a target and a tribunal.

Most citizens, whatever their politics, would know at once what they were looking at. Not the rule of law but its inversion: the courts turned into the instrument for removing the opponent the ballot box would not. They would understand that a republic in which the state can jail and disqualify the front-runner by criminalizing the acts of government has stopped being a democracy in any sense that matters — and that the elections held afterward, however clean the count, are hollow at the core.