In trying to destroy Trump, Democrats may have created their own nightmare, writes David Marcus

David Marcus is a columnist and the author of ‘Charade: The COVID Lies that Crushed a Nation.’

For Donald Trump these days it seems like his greatest enemies are the gift that just keeps on giving.

As President Joe Biden‘s Department of Justice flounders around trying to explain why, exactly, it decided to raid the home of a past and possibly future president, Trump’s lead over presumed primary challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has plumped up by a full 10 points.

It took just a week.

During that week Trump’s greatest foes — the American liberal news media — went back into freakout mode, fancifully predicting the end is near, the walls are closing in . . . or something like that.

As the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on August 8, there were alleged nuclear secrets to be found and passports to be confiscated – which Trump was said to initially be lying about, until his critics were later forced to admit, ‘Oh yeah, maybe the FBI did seize a few passports.’

The whole shambolic show, as a nation rolled its eyes again, couldn’t have helped Trump more politically if he scripted it himself.

The January 6th Committee, which we were told would absolutely prove the former president had committed grave and unpardonable crimes, not only has failed to do so, it has failed to change public opinion one iota in their direction.

This, despite all of its slick TV production quality.

In fact, a new Monmouth poll shows that 4 percent fewer Americans now think Trump was directly responsible for the events.

Fewer.

Speaking of the committee on the Capital Riot, the 45th president’s arch political rival, the steely eyed Rep. Liz Cheney, looks to be going down in inglorious defeat, poised to lose her House seat to the Trump-backed Harriet Hageman in Wyoming’s Tuesday primary.

In a new poll by the Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center, the incumbent Cheney is behind her opponent by nearly 30 points for the state’s only seat in the US House of Representatives.

Cheney and her adoring allies may think she’s the one in the white cowboy hat, but she’s not winning the shootout in this Western. It’s Donald Trump who will be riding off into the sunset, his chances at a return to the White House firmly burnished.

Suddenly Trump, whose star had seemed to be fading with the rise of DeSantis in the Sunshine State, is off the canvas, and prepared to throw punches.

Nobody should be shocked if a campaign announcement that not long ago seemed uncertain now comes sooner rather than later.

To his enemies, Trump has always been like a Chinese finger trap. They pull and pull, harder and harder to no avail, when they should just gently push. They could have chosen to ignore Trump in his post-presidency, to let him shout out his theories about the 2020 election into a void of podcasts and Truth Social posts.

Instead, House Democrats, and Liz Cheney, decided to hold primetime hearings about it, keeping Trump firmly in focus. And now, after this perplexing raid, he is the martyr of Mar-a-Lago.

What Democrats and the media and ‘principled conservatives’ don’t understand, what they have never understood, is that his supporters view over-the-top attacks on Trump as over-the-top attacks on themselves.

They see this raid on Mar-a-Lago as politically driven and fear, with good cause or not, that their own politics could land them in hot water. Especially now that Democrats have invented 87,000 new IRS agents out of thin air.

It could plausibly be argued that Democrats are playing eight-dimensional chess here. That they want Trump to remain the central figure of the GOP because they think it hurts the party and gives the bumbling Biden, or whoever the Democrats run, the best chance to win in 2024.

This was basically the playbook in 2016. But Dems should remember that their Summer of Jubilation over drawing the easily beatable Trump as an opponent turned into a Fall of Epic Defeat, casting a memorable pall over Hillary Clinton’s Election Night party in Brooklyn.

With the upcoming Midterms, Democrats and even some Republicans had believed that a spate of mostly successful Trump-backed congressional candidates would badly divide the party.

It just hasn’t happened.

In almost all of those races, the state parties have rallied round the nominee. Even Trump and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who have had more beef than Arby’s, have shown signs of a truce.

Put simply, Trump is not the corrosive and divisive force in the GOP that his enemies wish he was.

The Democrats are playing with fire. Orange fire. They have even donated to ultra-MAGA pro-Trump candidates in Republican primaries. Some are the very ones they say will steal elections and destroy democracy. It’s a dangerous gambit, especially for a party whose sitting president is about as popular as mosquitos right now.

But one thing is certain: The big winner in all of this mayhem is Donald Trump. He will never go gently into that dark political night as long as he can rage against the enemies who give him constant sustenance.

While the former president teases a new run, Washington insiders of all stripes have him eventually ruling it out. Out of office, Trump is making a lot of money. And the Republican National Committee is picking up his legal tab – roughly $2 million so far. Financial support that will cease if he announces his candidacy.

And Trump is reveling more in the status of being a contender than he ever would in a grueling new race and presidency.

The supreme irony is that Democrats, with their endless witch hunts, may have directly created their very own nightmare.