By Christian Schneider
Thursday, June 06, 2024
The day after he was convicted of 34 felonies for
falsifying business records relating to paying hush money to a porn star,
former president Donald Trump stood in the lobby of Trump Tower in midtown
Manhattan and attacked the judge who presided over the case. Trump
said Judge Juan Merchan “looks like an angel, but he’s really a devil,” and
accused Merchan of being a “tyrant.”
One need not even have a law degree from Trump University
to realize that attacking the one person who now holds your criminal sentence
in his hands is a suboptimal legal strategy.
But the chemicals sloshing around in Trump’s cranium
uniformly force him to demonstrate less self-control than Lauren Boebert at a
performance of Beetlejuice. It is why Trump was found in contempt
of court ten times during the trial, as he routinely broke the gag order
imposed by Merchan, an order implemented to keep the former president from
intimidating and threatening witnesses and jurors. It is why, after being slapped with a penalty of $5 million for defaming a
woman he allegedly sexually assaulted, Trump faced a second judgment of $83.3 million for continuing to defame her.
Typically, when ex-presidents give speeches, they are
paid big money to do so. When Trump makes speeches, it costs him
millions of dollars. In this case, it could cost him his freedom.
The hush-money case, because it relied on an unproven
legal theory that stretched the spirit of the law, has given Trump’s most
ardent loyalists just enough grounds to argue that, because the former
president is the victim of a legal hit job, the verdict has no bearing on his
fitness to resume presidenting. The same people who cheered as Trump promised to conduct politically motivated
prosecutions against his political opponents now feign outrage as Trump argues
he is the victim of one himself.
But it is Trump who has benefited most from the political
thumb on the scale. He evaded impeachment and removal from office twice — once
after attempting to overturn the results of a fair presidential election —
solely because enough U.S. senators happened to be from his own political
party. It appears one of the main reasons (in addition to his desire to avenge
his previous loss) he is running for president in 2024 is so he can claim that
all the post-presidency felony charges awaiting him are the result of
“politics.” If he hadn’t announced a run in 2024, he would simply be a
near-octogenarian sitting at home waiting for his federal trials to begin; as a
candidate, he can commandeer all the levers of power within the Republican
Party to rally to his defense.
And rally they have. The Bragg case allows Republican
leaders to cling to a single thread (“writing checks to cover up an affair
isn’t illegal, much less a felony”) while ignoring the entire tapestry of
Trump’s misconduct over the years. For these defenders, backing Trump is a
bloodless calculation: Defending the former president is like breaking the
speed limit — if everyone on the highway is doing it, then nobody gets pulled
over.
Looked at another way, keeping Trump viable is like being
a sports fan. To members of Congress and other GOP notables who’ve sold out
their principles just because their guy needs a win, Trump is Caitlin Clark,
unfairly under attack from the dark, liberal forces of the WNBA. Only in
Trump’s case, his fans’ political futures depend on his success.
If you’re so concerned about Trump’s dubious felony
convictions that you’re able to ignore the entirety of his behavior over the
past eight years, your moral sextant has been thrown overboard and now lies at
the bottom of the ocean beside the scary, bug-eyed fish with fiber-optic lights
protruding from their foreheads.
Nevertheless, focusing strictly on the outcome of the
trial allows Trump’s reputational massage therapists to avoid discussing the
circumstances that landed him in court in the first place. Imagine, for a
moment, that the trial had never happened and only focus on what we know — that
Trump the game-show host had sex with a porn star while his wife was at home
with their newborn baby, and that Trump the presidential candidate, hoping to
minimize the damage of any further lewd revelations after the Access
Hollywood tape came out, paid the woman off to keep quiet before the
2016 election.
Of course, Trump denies the sex, an obvious lie for which
jurors likely punished him; Trump would have us believe he is the first man in
world history to pay a porn star with whom he didn’t have sex to refrain from
telling people they did.
But again, forget the trial. Trump has recently called America a “fascist state.” He claims he never said “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton, when it was
regularly part of his shtick back in 2016. He promoted an outright lie that the FBI had a plan to assassinate
him during agents’ search of state documents he housed at his Mar-a-Lago
residence.
He’s also made the absurd prediction that, if he’s elected, Wall
Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich “will be released almost
immediately” from a Russian prison. We are one step removed from Trump claiming
that he, and not Dr. Evil’s father, invented the question mark.
Oh yeah, and there’s the whole “stop the steal”/January 6
episode.
And yet his loyalists trudge on, armed with Trump’s own
lies, engaging in MAGA cosplay by wearing red ties in court to cheer up the old
guy. They believe one day this will all be forgotten, but once you show
yourself to be so capable of absolute self-abasement, regaining your dignity is
like trying to unspoil milk. At some point, you are only what you are willing
to defend.
The Republican Party has been backed into a corner
because it picked one of the worst human beings in America to represent it. It
should be possible to look at last week’s verdict against Trump and disagree
with it without declaring it to be a Fidel Castro–like show trial, but this is where some
on the right have gone. When Maryland GOP Senate candidate Larry Hogan calmly
advised people to “respect the verdict” in the New York trial, Republican
National Committee nepo co-chair Lara Trump derided him, saying Hogan “doesn’t deserve the
respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point.”
Of course, Republicans will need that Maryland seat if
they have plans to retake control of the U.S. Senate, but in today’s GOP,
fealty to a bully supersedes commonsense politics.
John Stuart Mill famously called the British
Conservatives the “stupid party.” The comment now reads as prophetic of today’s
GOP.
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