What the GOP is NOT Saying
Putin, Orban, and China rally to Trump's defense
Donald Trump is, apparently, going to run as a latter-day Nelson Mandela, and the GOP is rallying around. What could possibly go wrong?
ICYMI: I shared some post-conviction thoughts with Politico:
We will be assured by the usual suspects that nothing matters and that Trump’s conviction on all counts won’t move the needle of our dysfunctional politics.
But there’s something about felony convictions that tends to focus the mind; and conviction on 34 counts is a clarifying event. The conventional wisdom is that this is already “baked into the cake.” But maybe it’s not, because until Thursday, Trump’s criminality was merely theoretical. Now it is a matter of public record.
Trump will now be running as a convicted felon. He will be nominated by the GOP as a convicted felon. And he will go before the voters in November as the first former president convicted of a crime.
In many states he is no longer eligible to vote. He would not be allowed to own a gun. He would be barred from serving on the board of any publicly traded company, ineligible for any position of public trust and absolutely barred from getting a security clearance.
Some voters — and no one knows how many — may think that’s relevant when they choose the next president of the United States.
Happy Sunday.
Obligatory dog pictures
Why, yes, Auggie would like a Margarita.
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Eli prefers liver snacks.
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Flashback to Old Pete (who would eat just about anything):
The Herd Gathers
We’ll get to the GOP in a moment, but the reaction from Trump’s international BFFs — in Russia, China, and Hungary —seems worth noting. Here’s Foreign Policy:
Via CNN, here’s Putin:
Meanwhile, Russia suggested there was a political conspiracy at play, despite Trump being convicted by a jury.
“In general, if we talk about Trump, it is obvious that political rivals are being eliminated there through all legal and illegal means,” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said in a daily call to journalists.
“This is visible to the whole world with the naked eye.”
Hungary’s fascist-adjacent strongman, Viktor Orban, also weighed in:
Orbán said he knew Trump to be “a man of honour.”
“As president, he always put America first, he commanded respect around the world and used this respect to build peace,” he said Friday in a post on ‘X’.
“Let the people make their verdict this November! Keep on fighting, Mr. President!” he added.
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Then, of course there is the GOP, whose support for the convicted, indicted Trump appears to be nearly unanimous. Andrew Egger notes some interesting distinctions:
One faction uttering po-faced denunciations of the New York jury’s supposed violations of cherished American norms, the other openly gibbering for Democratic blood.
Some Republicans have decided just to burn it all down:
(If you think Sam Alito is problematic, wait’ll you see Justice Mike Lee.)
What The GOP is Not Saying
Amid the GOP suck-a-thon it is worth noting that the NY hush money/election interference case is just one of many legal challenges Trump faces.
You may even have forgotten this one from late 2022: Jury finds Trump Organization guilty of tax fraud on all counts - ABC News
A Manhattan jury has found former President Donald Trump's namesake real estate company guilty of criminal tax fraud, three weeks after Trump announced a third presidential run.
The jury found the two entities of the Trump Organization guilty as charged on all counts, including scheme to defraud, conspiracy, criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records.
The Atlantic has a useful running tally of the rest:
The New York fraud case that Trump has already lost.
The Defamation and Sexual Assault cases that he has already lost (twice). The judge in the case has said that the jury found Trump liable for “rape.”
The Purloined Document case that charges Trump with “37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office, [including] willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements.”
The Fulton County Election Obstruction case, “a huge racketeering case against Trump and 18 others, alleging a conspiracy… with the aim of stealing the 2020 election.”
Jack Smith’s Election Subversion case, which charges Trump with four additional felonies for his corrupt attempts to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. This case is on hold while Trump’s claims of absolute immunity are considered by the Supreme Court.
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Despite all of this, the GOP is set to nominate Trump next month for another term in office. The furious reaction to his 34 felony convictions is an exclamation point on the GOP’s refusal to regard Trump’s rap sheet as disqualifying.
Pay attention to what Republicans are saying.
Many complain that the charges are strictly political, while others object to the nature of the charges. But no one is saying that he is innocent.
Not even his most slavish butt-kissers are arguing that Trump did not schtupp a porn star while his wife was recovering from the birth of their child. His defenders know he is lying about that. They may argue that he did not commit a felony when he paid her hush money, but no one is arguing that he did not, in fact, pay her money to keep her quiet before the 2016 election.
The New York trial spotlights the sleazy world of Trumpism. And, whether or not his conspiracy constitutes a felony (it did), it was a remarkable reminder of the man’s character and his fitness for office. The cheating, the lies, the threats, the smears, the payoffs, the fraud, the coverups, the corruption.
Leave aside for a moment the verdict of the jury: the GOP is looking at all of this as saying, “Yeah, we’re fine with that.”
While the MAGAfied GOP objects to efforts to hold him legally accountable for his actions, vanishingly few deny that he took those actions. They know (because there’s a tape) that he made the call to find the phantom votes in Georgia; they know he cheats on his taxes; they know that he has contempt for women; they know he tried to derail the certification of the election; and they know that he took the documents and refused to give them back. They know that almost every word out of his mouth is a lie.
Trump’s Republican allies don’t want him held legally accountable for any of that. But they know he did it all. And they are okay with it.
The Trump Tower Meltdown
How is Trump taking all of this? Rick Wilson had the best take:
Trump’s speech today did more damage than anyone could have expected precisely because Trump felt the need to shore up his damaged ego with a bizarre, discursive speech that will go down in the annals of American rhetoric as a true, zero-of-five-stars flop. It was like Francis Mallman at a PETA convention. It was like Ron DeSantis at Wigstock. It was like Steve Bannon at the annual meeting of the American Society of Dermatology.
What are the polls telling us?
I have ben reliably assured that the convictions could not hurt Trump’s campaign. And maybe they won’t. But the early numbers carry a whiff of hope:
Via Axios: “Poll: 49% of Independents think Trump should drop out post-guilty verdict” )
The Morning Consult poll conducted on Friday offers some of the first clues about how voters are reacting to the unprecedented situation.
By the numbers: 54% of registered voters "strongly" or "somewhat" approve of the guilty verdict compared to 34% who "strongly or "somewhat" disapprove.
*49% of Independents and 15% of Republicans said Trump should end his campaign because of the conviction.
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WASHINGTON, May 31 (Reuters) - Ten percent of Republican registered voters say they are less likely to vote for Donald Trump following his felony conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Friday.
The two-day poll, conducted in the hours after the Republican presidential candidate's conviction by a Manhattan jury on Thursday, also found that 56% of Republican registered voters said the case would have no effect on their vote and 35% said they were more likely to support Trump, who has claimed the charges against him are politically motivated and has vowed to appeal.
Nota Bene
Susan Glasser: The Revisionist History of the Trump Trial Has Already Begun - The New Yorker.
What Trump lacked in truly incandescent rage, however, was soon supplied, in excess, by his followers—a backlash that unfolded as a carefully choreographed and truly unprecedented assault on the legitimacy of the American legal system. It struck me as no less threatening for having obviously been planned largely in advance. “Kangaroo court. Banana republic,” one social-media post from the Trump White House veteran Nick Ayers read—a pithy summation of much of the maga response. Senator Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, called the verdict “the most egregious miscarriage of justice in our nation’s history,” proving both that he does not know our nation’s history and that hyperbole in defense of their leader is considered the most forgivable of G.O.P. sins.
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Ali Breland: The MAGA Internet Calls for War - The Atlantic
The MAGA faithful are once again on the internet threatening violence. Lots of Republicans, of course, responded to Trump’s felony verdict with simple outrage rather than calls for a “neutralization operation.” But more extreme language has appeared all across the right-wing posting ecosystem. Some Proud Boys chapters responded with the word “war” on their Telegram channels, as reported by Wired, and Reuters found instances of Trump supporters calling for violence against jurors and the judge in the case, as well as calls for civil war and insurrection. An anonymous right-wing X account went viral by posting “Third World Problems Require Third World Solutions” on top of a video of the 2020 military coup in Myanmar.
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Adam Serwer: Trump Wishes His Trial Were Rigged - The Atlantic
There is a simple, foolproof way to predict when Trump will describe something or someone as rigged or corrupt: when he doesn’t get what he wants. Elections he loses are fraudulent, legal decisions that go against him are rigged, and anyone who opposes him is corrupt. In every single instance, Trump is decrying not a corrupt individual or rigged process, but a person or process that is not corrupt or rigged enough to give him the results he seeks.
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Auggie is taking all of this in stride this weekend.
I love clarity of your writing and I also love the quite necessary dog pictures!
Charlie cited the list in The Atlantic of other legal system judgments and indictments against the 45th president. For more with regard to that, including documentation, see this essay.
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https://decencyandsense.substack.com/p/decency-sense-and-the-maximum-felon
Consider some recent developments.
• In 1995 or 1996, the man who would decades later become the 45th president sexually assaulted a writer named E. Jean Carroll. We know this to be true because Ms. Carroll proved it in two civil trials, one of which came to a decision in May 2023 and the other in January 2024. The 45th president owes Ms. Carroll $88.3 million in damages.
• Over the course of many years, the man who would become the 45th president committed massive fraud in the conduct of his real estate business. As a result of a civil suit concluded in February 2024, he is obliged to pay $355 million plus interest to New York State.
• Over the course of many years, through his Donald J. Trump Foundation, the man who would become the 45th president cheated charities by diverting for his private and political purposes funds that were supposed to go to them. In December 2019, a court ordered that he pay the eight charities – Army Emergency Relief, the Children’s Aid Society, Citymeals-on-Wheels, Give an Hour, Martha’s Table, the United Negro College Fund, the United Way of National Capital Area, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum – $250,000 each, or $2 million and that the remaining $1.8 million from the account of the dissolved Trump Foundation also be distributed among the charities.
• Over the course of many years, the man who would become the 45th president operated a fraudulent enterprise called “Trump University.” In April 2018 a federal court finalized a $25 million settlement to compensate the roughly 7,000 students he cheated.
• In July 2023, a federal grand jury handed up an indictment superseding that which it had handed up the previous month. It detailed the deceptive lengths to which the 45th president and his accomplices went to obstruct the federal government’s efforts to retrieve some of the country’s most sensitive documents.
• In August 2023, a Fulton County, Georgia grand jury indicted the 45th president for his participation in a multifaceted racketeering conspiracy to subvert the 2020 presidential election.
• In August 2023, a federal grand jury indicted the 45th president for three criminal conspiracies in which he participated to subvert the 2020 election.
• In January 2023, the January 6 Committee made available a final tranche of materials it had collected in connection with its investigation of the efforts of the 45th president and his accomplices to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the violent attack on the Capitol that he personally incited and which he declined to address for hours as a mob injured police, endangered the lives of members of Congress, and threatened to lynch Vice President Mike Pence. The January 6 Committee extensively expanded upon the materials presented at the February 2021 impeachment trial of the 45th president. At the conclusion of that trial, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell excoriated the 45th president. He spoke accurately when he made the following statements:
••• Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty.
••• There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The issue is not only the President’s intemperate language on January 6th. It is not just his endorsement of remarks in which an associate urged ‘trial by combat.’ It was also the entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe; the increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election that was being stolen in some secret coup by our now-President.
••• Sadly, many politicians sometimes make overheated comments or use metaphors that unhinged listeners might take literally. This was different. This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.
••• The unconscionable behavior did not end when the violence began. Whatever our ex-President claims he thought might happen that day… whatever reaction he says he meant to produce… by that afternoon, he was watching the same live television as the rest of the world. A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him. It was obvious that only President Trump could end this. Former aides publicly begged him to do so. Loyal allies frantically called the Administration. But the President did not act swiftly. He did not do his job. He didn’t take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed, and order restored. Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily as the chaos unfolded. He kept pressing his scheme to overturn the election!
••• Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in danger… even as the mob carrying Trump banners was beating cops and breaching perimeters… the President sent a further tweet attacking his Vice President.
••• Later, even when the President did halfheartedly begin calling for peace, he did not call right away for the riot to end. He did not tell the mob to depart until even later. And even then, with police officers bleeding and broken glass covering Capitol floors, he kept repeating election lies and praising the criminals.
••• In recent weeks, our ex-President’s associates have tried to use the 74 million Americans who voted to re-elect him as a kind of human shield against criticism. Anyone who decries his awful behavior is accused of insulting millions of voters. That is an absurd deflection. 74 million Americans did not invade the Capitol. Several hundred rioters did. And 74 million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it. One person did.