The rhetorical escalation from the four-times-indicted ex-president came at a rally in South Dakota on Friday night where he accused his possible 2024 opponent, President Joe Biden, of ordering his indictment on 91 charges across four criminal cases as a form of election interference.

While his predecessor spent the weekend casting doubt on America’s election system, Biden was on the other side of the globe in India and Vietnam building international support for his signature foreign policy strategy of combating the threat to Western democracy from authoritarian leaders in China and Russia.

Back home, the ex-president’s extremism also exposes the timidity of most of his Republican primary rivals, who have recently been ganging up on rookie candidate Vivek Ramaswamy but are only willing to criticize Trump in the most oblique terms to avoid crossing his millions of GOP supporters.

Trump’s bluntness and carefully maintained image as an outsider, despite the fact that he used to live in the White House, allow him to endlessly tap a seam of resentment against Washington and political, economic and media “elites” that is deeply felt by many who back the “Make America Great Again” movement.

And schooled by Trump, Republicans widely complain that the current president’s son, Hunter Biden – who is under investigation by a special counsel over alleged tax and gun law violations after the collapse of a plea deal – is being given preferential treatment by the Justice Department.

But the hundreds of pages of evidence in criminal indictments alleging Trump’s use of presidential power to try to steal an election and the way he is using his appearances and social media to try to intimidate judges and potential jury pools ahead of his trials have left such critiques badly outdated.

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