It’s hard to adequately describe what happened to Donald Trump in Venezuela-on-the-Hudson. Outrageous? A travesty of justice? A devasting blow to the sanctity of our justice system and its reputation for fairness and nonpartisanship? An American repetition of the Soviet show trials of the 1930s?

It’s all of those things. And you don’t have to be a Trump supporter to understand that.

A former president was convicted of 34 misdemeanors for paperwork errors (whose statute of limitations had run out) that were changed to felonies because he had supposedly violated another state law—nowhere mentioned in the indictment—that makes it a crime to use “unlawful” means to promote or oppose the election of a candidate.

And what was that “unlawful” means? Well, the defendant didn’t know because those other “unlawful” means (i.e., other crimes) weren’t mentioned in the indictment, either. The judge told the jurors that they didn’t need to even agree on what other crimes the defendant had committed, seemingly in conflict with hundreds of years of English and American jurisprudence, including the Constitution’s guarantee of due process of law.

No, said the judge, the jury could consider violations of tax law or a violation of federal campaign finance law or of some other unnamed law for listing as a legal expense—instead of as a campaign expense—a settlement payment made to an individual who was represented by counsel in a perfectly legitimate, and perfectly legal, transaction. But no need for a unanimous decision on that........

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