I’m not saying I agree with Trump saying that in the first place. But to say he’s prosecuted because he’s running and wouldn’t be if he wasn’t seems like the definition of politically motivated. In any event, he’s being prosecuted because he’s guilty.
When someone in good faith says “This prosecution against me is politically motivated.” They are communicating the idea that the charges were manufactured without any underlying crime or possibly the underlying crime is minuscule, but the charges are overblown. Neither of those is the case with Trump.
If you’re just using the dictionary definitions of the words, “politically”, “motivated”, and “prosecuted” then yes it meets that, but then so does a whole bunch of other absurd stuff you don’t mean when using the same logic. By that logic a home burglar is the victim of “politically motivate prosecution” because our legal policy is that burglary is a crime and that the burglar is being prosecuted because of it.
That’s not a good parallel, it’s the politically ‘motivated’ part he’s referring to. If someone is being prosecuted because they’re running for office, and you have a legitimate argument that if they had chosen not to run for office the charges would have been dropped, it’s legitimate to say it’s politically motivated.
On the other hand, if your crime was literally campaign finance crimes and voter manipulation, there’s a reasonable argument that ‘politically motivated’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing here. If you did a political crime, and seem likely to continue to be politically motivated to commit more crimes, it kind of makes sense that prosecuting you with a tiny bit of political intent isn’t totally unreasonable.
