Donald Trump’s very first statement after his conviction on 34 felony charges came, quite naturally, in the form of a fundraising email. “I am a political prisoner!” the former president declared, even though he had not yet been sentenced and may never spend a day in a penitentiary.
Why the ludicrous Republican response to Trump’s conviction matters
Republicans are busy attacking the legitimacy of the American legal and political system. We’ve seen where that leads.
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
Trump was not the only Republican lying about the verdict. Just minutes after it was released, House Speaker Mike Johnson blamed Trump’s conviction on a Democratic conspiracy.
“Democrats cheered as they convicted the leader of the opposing party on ridiculous charges,” he said. “The weaponization of our justice system has been a hallmark of the Biden Administration, and the decision today is further evidence that Democrats will stop at nothing to silence dissent and crush their political opponents.”
But Democrats didn’t convict Trump; a jury of 12 ordinary Americans did. The Biden administration played no role in prosecuting the case; the indictment came from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and was issued after federal prosecutors declined to go after Trump on similar charges.
Johnson knows all that, but it doesn’t matter. His goal is to support Trump’s narrative that the entire American political and legal system is controlled by Biden and Democrats: a banana republic, not a democracy worthy of its name. A range of leading Republicans — from House Majority Steve Scalise to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to rising Senate stars Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance — have all said basically the same thing.
At this point, you might be wondering: Is any of this surprising? Trump always claims he’s the victim of a conspiracy, and Republicans always end up backing whatever Trump says.
But that’s precisely the problem. The current Republican party is so hostile to the foundations of the American political system that they can be counted on to attack the possibility of a fair Trump trial. Either Trump should be able to do whatever he wants with no accountability, or it’s proof that the entire edifice of American law and politics is rotten.
The insurrectionary ideology
There are perfectly legitimate ways to raise questions about both Trump’s conviction and the fairness of the American legal system more broadly.
“Never Trump” conservative David French, for example, recently wrote a column in the New York Times questioning Bragg’s case. Many legal commentators on both the right and the left have expressed similar concerns since the indictment last year, arguing that the prosecution relied on a novel legal theory liable to be rejected by higher courts. It’s hardly unreasonable to worry about bringing a case like this against a former president, especially given that the alleged crimes involving the 2016 election pale in comparison to what he’s accused of doing in 2020.
What Trump and other elected Republicans are doing is categorically different. They are not merely claiming that the jury was wrong, or that the prosecution’s arguments were bad. They argued that the conviction was illegitimate: the product of a Biden administration conspiracy to send its political opponents to prison, akin to a Soviet show trial.
In his statement, Vance made it clear that this amounts to a conspiracy theory: “Dems invented a felony to ‘get Trump,’ with the help of a Soros funded prosecutor and a Biden donor Judge, who rigged the entire case to get this outcome.” There’s no evidence the judge “rigged” the case, and Vance doesn’t provide any.
But the evidence isn’t the point. The conspiratorial vibe is — ensuring that, in whatever way possible, Republican voters get the message that anything bad that ever happens to Donald Trump is the fault of the Democrat-controlled system.
It’s a level of paranoia that makes Richard Nixon look grounded, yet there’s every reason to believe that it’s widely shared in the GOP base. An NPR poll released this morning, asking Americans if the Trump trial would affect their vote, found that 90 percent of Republicans either would be unaffected or more likely to vote for Trump after a guilty verdict.
Again, none of this is surprising: The exact same thing happened when Trump was first indicted over a year ago. But that just goes to show how dangerous this mindset is. Republicans really, truly, deeply believe that the American government is out to get them and their standard bearer. In a changing country, ideologically and demographically, Trump is their rock; an attack on him is an attack not only on all Republicans, but on their very understanding of America.
This is the logic that led 2020 election denial to take firm root in the GOP’s soil, culminating in the terrible events of January 6. Those events are a warning of just how dangerous attacking the system can be.
Republicans could have opted not to continue down this path. Larry Hogan, a former Maryland governor currently running for Senate, issued a statement urging Republicans to respect the rule of law. So too did Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas.
But the vast bulk of the party has chosen to throw in their lot with Trump and his politics of conspiracy. Let us hope the consequences will be different in this election than the last one.
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