Former President Donald Trump is currently facing trial in New York on dubious criminal charges brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg that have been dismissed from the start as highly politicized and weak by not just critics but also many legal analysts and experts.

That assessment of Bragg's case against Trump has only been further confirmed and made self-evident by the transparent way the media has sought to portray the prosecutor as some sort of reluctantly heroic champion for democracy and justice, such as in a recent NPR profile.

Stripping away the glossy veneer of liberal media puff pieces about the prosecution, however, in conjunction with the biased hit jobs against the former president, it has become devastatingly obvious to all that Bragg is acting as the embodiment of the Democratic Party's broader weaponization of the justice system against its political rivals.

The media's lionization of DA Bragg

The NPR piece, which included quotes from several of DA Bragg's friends and former colleagues and classmates, went out of its way to lionize the prosecutor and elevate him to hero status amid his ongoing effort to jail the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

He was portrayed as "a smart, deliberate lawyer" and a "selfless public servant" who is "thoughtful" in his actions and is "neither moved nor driven by politics."

The article further played up that portrait of Bragg as a "detail-oriented" attorney by highlighting the "challenges" he faced early on in his tenure but eventually overcame, both in pursuing criminal charges against Trump as well as in implementing his progressive agenda and ideas for criminal justice system reforms.

Glowing reviews for Bragg's top prosecutors

It isn't just the district attorney who has received this treatment from the media, though, as Vanity Fair published on the same day a decidedly positive profile piece on two of Bragg's main prosecutors in the DA's Office -- Matthew Colangelo and Susan Hoffinger -- who were heralded as the leaders of his "All-Star" team.

That article, which cited some of the same individuals who gave glowing assessments of Bragg in the NPR piece, did its best to similarly portray the two top prosecutors as being apolitical crusaders for justice engaged in a battle for the ages against a dire threat to the ideals of democracy, if not Western civilization more broadly.

Those articles from NPR and Vanity Fair are just two examples of the pure and unadulterated political theater that this criminal prosecution of the former president has always been, but to be sure, Trump has been more than willing to engage in the same sort of theater himself when necessary.

Politico reported this week on Trump's efforts to "flip the script" and go on the offensive against DA Bragg, often by pointing to high-profile crimes that occurred in Bragg's jurisdiction, such as his recent visit to a bodega where a clerk who defended himself against an armed attacker in 2022 was initially charged with murder by Bragg before the charge was eventually dropped under intense public pressure in support of the innocent clerk.

Legal experts say Bragg's case "reeks of political motivations"

Fox News reported that all of that and far more led former federal prosecutor John Malcolm to decry the prosecution of former President Trump as "overtly political," especially given that the charges underlying DA Bragg's case are typically misdemeanors -- for which the statute of limitations long ago expired -- that were "ginned up" to be felonies on a novel and untested legal theory.

Malcolm told the outlet that it is "ironic that in this case, a prosecutor who has developed a well-deserved reputation for going easy on actual felons, even violent ones, by allowing them to plead to misdemeanors is taking what should, at most, be a misdemeanor violation, and has ramped them up into highly questionable felony charges."

Constitutional law expert John Shu said Bragg's case was "particularly egregious" and undeniably political as it is intended to keep Trump tied to a courtroom instead of out campaigning for office, and is being done so in a way that would never be employed against a Democratic candidate for the presidency.

Syracuse University law professor Gregory Germain told Fox News, "A really good prosecutor has to be very careful to make sure that they have an extremely strong case before bringing a charge against the former president that is going to appear to be political," and added, "This criminal prosecution just reeks of political motivations. And that's a real problem for the legal system."