Trump’s First Law: For every criminal charge, there is an equal and opposite surge among Republicans.
Trump’s First Law: For every criminal charge, there is an equal and opposite surge among Republicans.
L ast week, a former president was indicted on 37 federal criminal counts, which made it more likely that he will once again be president.
You are likely not on hallucinogenic mushrooms, so read that sentence again. (If you are hallucinating, no need to go back, as it probably made perfect sense.)
It would have been inconceivable just a few years ago, but by taking attention away from who he is and placing the spotlight on his accusers, the Department of Justice has actually done Trump a massive favor.
It is simply further proof of Trump’s First Law: For every criminal charge, there is an equal and opposite surge among Republicans. And with each charge, he inches closer to securing the 2024 GOP nomination.
Pretend, for a moment, that every legal action against Donald Trump during and after his presidency was, as he continues to describe them, a “hoax.” Imagine he had not been impeached twice, not been found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, not faced dozens of criminal counts as part of two indictments in New York and Florida, not faced an investigation to see whether he colluded with Russia, not faced accusations of obstructing justice during said investigation, and not faced another investigation into his role in the January 6 riot and trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Even if none of the above had occurred, Trump would still be the least fit person to hold the presidency in any of our lifetimes. That unfitness doesn’t have anything to do with investigations or criminal charges, or even just the undeniably substantive charges. It instead has everything to do with the words that continue to come out of his own mouth.
These days, barely a word or concept emanates from Trump’s mouth or social-media account that isn’t an outright lie. He lies about winning the 2020 election, lies about his handling of classified documents, lies about his political adversaries, and lies about people that used to work for him. His social-media feed is a fire hose of deranged misinformation, sporadically complemented with racist invective.
But with official legal proceedings beginning Tuesday, the question of Trump’s fitness for office now becomes a courtroom drama, rather than one focusing on the type of person he is and the long list of wretched things he has said and done. Instead of discussing what a revolting man Trump is, his defenders now get to argue legal technicalities and prosecutorial motivations, as specious as those arguments may be.
In effect, for most Republicans defending Trump, it’s like speeding — if everyone on the highway is doing it, no one will get popped with a ticket.
Which is why some of Trump’s most breathless fans wasted no time rushing to his defense. After the indictments became public, Florida senator Marco Rubio took a break from tweeting Bible verses to post that there is “no limit to what these people will do to protect their power & destroy those who threaten it, even if it means ripping our country apart & shredding public faith in the institutions that hold our republic together.”
Shortly after decrying the alleged partisan motivations of the current Department of Justice, Rubio took to Fox News to argue that the next Republican president will be under “tremendous pressure” to indict Joe Biden or his “crackhead son.”
South Carolina representative Nancy Mace, once heralded as a voice of reason in the House Republican caucus, said the Left wanted to give Trump the “death sentence” for merely “slow walk[ing] documents.” That is a . . . take.
Not to be outdone, human QAnon thread Marjorie Taylor Greene filmed a video at the U.S. Capitol complaining that America has become a “Communist country,” that we had been “taken over,” and that we “are not a free country anymore.” Presumably she was then apprehended by the Gazpacho Police.
Other Trump sycophants tried to help by inventing imaginary crimes, then exonerating Trump of them. In an unhinged rant on ABC’s This Week, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham screeched that Trump was not guilty of espionage, boldly eviscerating a charge that literally nobody had made. (Some of the Trump charges were made under the Espionage Act, but there are sections in the act that have nothing to do with spy craft.)
Radio-show host Hugh Hewitt downplayed Trump’s behavior, tweeting, “That’s it? The conspiracy is with the aide who moved the boxes? No documents were sold or given to third parties not in his close employ?”
Yes! Just think of all the crimes Trump didn’t commit! Not a single accusation of armed robbery, arson, indecent exposure, or selling Swiss cheese without holes (yes, a federal crime) to be found in the 49-page indictment!
Perhaps the most novel excuse for defending Trump came from Iowa senator Chuck Grassley, who said he didn’t read the indictment because, after all, “I’m not a legal analyst.”
Grassley is the former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Even most of the people running against Trump for president in 2024 quickly ran to his aid, most notably former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who seems determined to hold every position on the Trump indictment before the actual trial starts. At first, Haley said the Trump indictment “is not how justice should be pursued in our country,” then pivoted to call Trump “reckless.” But on Tuesday, she said she would be “inclined” to offer Trump a pardon “for the good of the country.” Within a month, she will have adopted more personas than George Santos during drag week.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis similarly appears to be deploying the “all of the above” strategy. At first he promised to “excise political bias” from the DOJ and end its “weaponization,” but then he acknowledged that, had he, as a naval officer, mishandled classified documents as Trump is charged with doing, he would have been “court-martialed in a New York minute.” He then went back to saying there shouldn’t be a different standard for a “Democrat secretary of state versus a former Republican president.”
The capitulation of everyone in the presidential field to Trump, save former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson — noted future non-presidents — is simply a further reminder to voters that Trump remains the alpha dog in the field. The criminal indictments simply galvanize his support and allow him to ask little old ladies to send more five-dollar checks to a man who has a chandelier over his toilet.
The common thread among Trump’s defenders, of course, is that none are willing to actually discuss what he is being accused of — taking boxes stuffed with classified documents, then lying and scheming to keep them even after being served a subpoena. The evidence is damning, which is why his supporters lean heavily on whataboutism, exhuming the corpse of the Hillary Clinton private-server fiasco seven years ago. But few Trump defenders stop to realize that by retroactively calling for Clinton’s prosecution in 2016, they are effectively arguing that Trump should face criminal sanctions now for what is a far worse transgression.
In the words of Succession patriarch Logan Roy, “You are not serious people.”
Of course, just because Hillary Clinton was probably guilty of mishandling classified information doesn’t mean Trump is innocent. And the most damning piece of evidence against the former president is the surreptitious recording of Trump boasting about still having sensitive documents — sensitive as in war plans — that he admitted he could no longer declassify.
But his actual actions aren’t on trial in the court of the Republican primary, where he continues to use his candidacy as a shield. Trump bellows “ELECTION INTERFERENCE” over and over. It is enough to make one suspect Trump knew criminal charges were coming and decided to run for president solely so he could make the case that the legal actions taken against him were the result of political persecution, not because he had actually broken the law.
If he were simply “Florida Man Donald Trump,” America’s dirty golf-playing grandpa, he would be a sitting duck in Mar-a-Lago. But as a presidential candidate, not only can he claim electoral victimhood, he can raise millions of dollars for his legal defense.
And thus we have another first in American politics: a man running for president because he is in legal trouble, not in spite of it.
Trump’s defenders routinely condemn the DOJ’s indictment as “unprecedented,” but it is only unprecedented because we have never had a president so wholly lawless that the DOJ would consider such a thing. It would also likely be unprecedented to have a president fill his pants with live lobsters and run through a Walmart, but nobody would blame the lobsters.
The good news for Trump’s presidential rivals is that backing him now will save them from having to write a concession speech after Super Tuesday. They may not have suspended their campaigns in practice, but they have in spirit. If you, as a presidential candidate, can’t explain why you would be a more suitable president than someone under two (and counting) indictments, even when one of them is of the utmost seriousness, then you are simply wasting the public’s time.
But then again, Trump is demonstrating that moral weakness can be a candidate’s biggest strength, so anything is possible.