WND Wants You To Believe Trump Is Being Treated Just Like Alexei Navalny

WorldNetDaily’s fanboyism for Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of Vladimir Putin and his naively gushing tour of Moscow didn’t age well for either WND or Carlson. A few days after Carlson returned from Russia, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny — imprisoned under harsh conditions on trumped-up charges, presumably on Putin’s orders — died in prison (also presumably on Putin’s orders).

Surprisingly (or perhaps not), WND’s response to Navalny’s death largely centered around exploiting it for right-wing political purposes — specifically, laughably insisting that Donald Trump is being treated exactly like Putin treated Navalny. Mike Pottage huffed in a Feb. 19 column:

The headline read “Putin critic Alexei Navalny dead at 47, Russian officials say,” and the story quotes U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken as saying the death of a Russian prisoner demonstrates Russia is rotten to its core.

That was not very diplomatic of the American secretary of state.

The Marxists in American government differ little from the Marxists in the Russian government.

Blinken put it this way: Navalny’s “death in a Russian prison and the fixation and fear of one man only underscores the weakness and rot at the heart of the system that Putin has built.”

This from a man who attacks Israel and uses Ukraine to carry out a war against Russia. His message today. Russia is bad. His message tomorrow. Donald J. Trump is a Russian agent.

Pottage then even more laughably (and baselessly) claimed that violent Capitol riot insurrectionists are getting the Navalny treatment:

Who cares if Blinken talks to other countries about dead prisoner Alexie [sic] Navalny? Is Blinken going to recommend going to war over the death of someone in a Russian prison. If so, what about Epstein? The arrogance of American foreign policy is astounding.

Has Blinken expressed any concern for the Jan. 6 prisoners icarcerated [sic] for unspecific misdemeanor offenses in 2021? And, is the U.S. going to try and dictate to the system of justice used in all nations? Is it our business, and should we be preaching to others while our cities burn, our prisons are being emptied, and criminals are handed, essentially, parking tickets for violent acts?

Pottage then even more baselessly insisted that the U.S., not Russia, is responsible for the war in Ukraine:

Is the Biden administration any better than the Putin administration? How, in fact, is it different? For starters, Putin is not senile.

Team Biden’s leadership is the language of “Russia, Russia, Russia,” and now there is actual war with Russia financed and supplied by the USA.

If the purpose of this war was to save the Ukrainian people from Russia, it has successfully killed more than 400,000 of them. When we have killed off half-million folks, can we declare victory and go home? How does Mr. Diplomacy, Antony Blinken, square the surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan as an urgent part of American diplomacy with the resurgence of war, this time in Ukraine?

Pottage concluded by whining:

Now Team Biden is at war with Russia, and the conflict is used as a bludgeon against the political opponents of the Democratic Party. Why? Because the party does not look upon the Republican Party as a group with different opinions. It views the GOP as “the enemy.” Team Biden treats the leading Republican candidate for president as a common criminal.

The truth is the Democratic Party would do to Donald Trump precisely what they allege happened to Alexei Navalny.

Andy Schlafly followed the same template in his Feb. 20 column:

The hue and cry about the recent death of Putin critic Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison overlooks that Biden and the Deep State are trying to imprison Trump until he dies, too. Anti-Trumpers in our country have been misusing the legal system with a vengeance ever since Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Trump compared Navalny’s death, while under a three-decade prison sentence, to the relentless lawfare to imprison and bankrupt himself. Some scoffed at that comparison, but Biden and his minions are trying to treat Trump as Putin reportedly mistreated Navalny.

Trump posted on Truth Social, “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”

President Trump properly commuted the 14-year sentence of Democrat Rod Blagojevich, but Biden has not pardoned or released any of the Trump supporters who have received even longer sentences for non-violent activity. While pro-Trump protesters are imprisoned in a Gulag, as Navalny was in Russia, Biden and his media supporters applaud.

Biden’s prosecutors demanded a 33-year prison sentence for Enrique Tarrio for a Jan. 6-related protest even though Tarrio was not even at the Capitol that day. Tarrio received a 22-year sentence, while other Trump supporters were sentenced to more than 15 years, and it seems likely some will die in prison as Navalny did.

Schlafly censored the fact that Tarrio was the ringleader of the insurrection plot, so his actual presence at the riot was not necessary. His whining continued:

Biden’s secretary of homeland security, the recently impeached Alejandro Mayorkas, has personally prevented Biden’s political rival RFK Jr. from receiving customary Secret Service protection despite multiple criminal intrusions of his home and an armed thug pretending to be a U.S. Marshal showing up at an RFK Jr. campaign event. Yet anti-Trumpers have remained silent about this mistreatment by Biden of his rival.

This is another issue the GOP-majority House could hold a vote on, enacting a resolution calling on Biden to provide Secret Service protection for his political rivals. RFK Jr. is polling at 7% nationwide, which is more than enough to justify providing him with the same protection presidential candidates have typically received in prior elections.

Northwestern law professor Steven Calabresi calls the recent New York judgment of $355 million plus interest against Trump and his family “a travesty and an unjust political act rivaled only in American politics by the killing of former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton by Vice President Aaron Burr.”

When liberals complain about a regime misusing its power against a rival, they should look first at how Biden is doing this.

Laura Hollis played the dishonest Trump-is-Navalny card in her Feb. 22 column:

Stories like that of Navalny have traditionally served as cautionary tales about the concentration of power and the superiority of the U.S. system of government. Dictators are laws unto themselves, but America is “a country of laws and not of men,” or so the saying goes.

And yet, what we are seeing in case after case – at the federal, state and local levels of government – is the radical abandonment of that principle in favor of shredding the law to “get” whoever the government has decided the desired target is.

And in many (though not all) of these cases, that target is Donald Trump.

In Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis is prosecuting Trump for “election interference” under a statute written to go after the Mafia. The case has holes in it big enough to drive a truck through, but no matter.

[…]

At the moment, that seems to be limited (using the word loosely) to destroying their opponents’ reputations, their political careers, their businesses and their financial wherewithal.

At the moment.

But remember: If Vladimir Putin has his enemies murdered, it’s because he knows he can get away with it. The rule of law is supposed to protect us from abuses of power. If we allow it to be eroded, what’s to keep those in power here from reaching the same conclusion?

WND also published an outside article noting that Trump “praised” Navalny “being criticized for his initial response to his death,” which involved a “post on Truth Social that was widely criticized for omitting sympathy for the opposition leader,” as well as a syndicated column by Ben Shapiro stating that Putin “murdered” Navalny with nary a mention of Trump. As far as WND’s regular stable of columnists, it took until March 1 before one of them — James Zumwalt, who has been WND’s lone consistent critic of Putin — explicitly blamed Putin for Navalny’s death, declaring: “The KGB was officially dissolved on Dec. 3, 1991. Sadly, Putin demonstrates to the world more than three decades later its mindset has not been lost on him.”