By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, April 05, 2023
For Republicans who struggle with lingering trauma arising from the 2016 GOP primaries, the last 48 hours have been the stuff from which flashbacks are triggered.
Donald Trump is once again a ubiquitous figure on your television. His every movement is being tracked. His inner thoughts are the subject of divination by cable-news panelists, who are drafted onto the set to vamp while cameras maintain a vigil over “Trump Force One” as it idles on the tarmac. News outlets broadcast prolonged shots of nothing more than the former president’s podium, which, while Trumpless, was still adorned with a text-to-donate code that was practically underlined by the cable-news chyron. Republicans not named Trump would suffocate for lack of oxygen in this media environment. The Trump Show is back, and the former president’s supporters and opponents alike are enjoying every minute of it.
But when the former president finally took the stage last night, his appearance was evocative of the 2016 campaign in ways that might have unnerved Trump’s allies. Just about every prominent Republican lawmaker passed on the invitation to attend this “memorable and historic evening.” Save for a few loyalists in Congress, the institutional GOP was nowhere to be found. Trump had to satisfy himself with the support of those members of his family who haven’t withdrawn from the public eye and longtime Trump fixers with nowhere else to go, like Roger Stone.
The speech Trump gave was equally redolent of the early 2016 campaign — and not in ways that are entirely beneficial for the former president. When he invokes themes that resonate across the political spectrum — grievances with the status quo that have explicable policy-oriented remedies — Trump’s appeal is undeniable. Even if those themes do not resonate with you, it’s not hard to see how they would do so among broad swaths of the American electorate. But when he descends into myopia and fixates on the personal slights that animate him more than anything else, Trump loses the plot.
In last night’s post-arraignment speech, Trump dwelled on his own misfortune, interweaving self-pity with ponderously long perorations on his inscrutably complex legal defense against the many criminal allegations he is facing today and will likely face later this year.
Trump began not by unraveling the dubious charges brought against him by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office but by focusing on the charges he could face if Fulton County, Ga., prosecutor Fani Willis decides to move forward with her case against the former president. Willis, “a local racist Democrat” in Trump’s estimation, is seeking charges related to the “perfect call” Trump made to local officials asking them to “find” the votes necessary to flip the state in 2020.
Trump quickly pivoted to the Justice Department’s special counsel looking into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified materials, the “radical left lunatic known as a bomb thrower” Jack Smith. He then launched into a diatribe about the “non-criminal Presidential Records Act,” which compelled him to negotiate over releasing those documents with the National Archives and Records Administration, “the radical left trouble-making organization” But, Trump insisted, the Presidential Records Act is toothless, and his negotiations with the FBI over supplemental locks on unsecured facilities where the information was housed were entirely aboveboard.
Trump dug deep into the weeds when he raged over a pending civil-fraud case in New York State. He savaged New York Attorney General Letitia James, who “said that I falsified my financial statements.” But, he complained, “all cases have a strong disclaimer clause in them.” Indeed, he’s “very underleveraged” and has “very little debt relative to the value of assets.”
Finally, the former president devoted his attention to the case that brought his followers to Mar-a-Lago in the first place. “My lawyers came to me, and they said, ‘There’s nothing here,’” Trump observed of Bragg’s case against him. “‘They’re not even saying what you did.’” Indeed, the advice of Trump’s attorneys pervaded most of his remarks at the cost of clarity and a coherent political narrative.
That is not to say that Trump’s remarks lacked political salience. His attacks on the Biden administration’s foreign policy, progressive governance in America’s cities, and even the degree to which he is uniquely hounded by investigators who invent novel legal theories that seem to apply only to him are valid and sonorous. You can imagine those lines being internalized and repeated by Trump’s voters.
It’s harder to imagine the former president’s backers retaining the fine distinctions between the applicable statutes in the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act, the validity of his financial disclosures, the relative debt assumed by his creditors, and who the heck Mark Pomerantz is. Trump’s allies may be uncomfortable with the degree to which Trump’s speech was dominated by such matters over the attacks he’s good at.
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