The GOP Is Not Taking the News of Trump’s Impending Indictment Well
The GOP Is Not Taking the News of Trump’s Impending Indictment Well
Their responses, from rage to conspiracy theories, are about as unhinged as one would expect.
Donald Trump is the victim of his own success.
At least, that’s the take House Speaker Kevin McCarthy offered in response to news that the former and would-be next president faces a third criminal indictment, this time for trying to end American democracy by plotting to steal an election and stirring up a mob to assist.
“If you noticed recently, President Trump went up in the polls and was actually surpassing President Biden for reelection,” McCarthy told reporters on Tuesday as the news broke that Special Counsel Jack Smith had notified Trump he was a target of possible criminal prosecution. “So what do they do now? Weaponize government to go after their number-one opponent.”
McCarthy claimed this was something that has been happening “time and time again” and “the American public is tired of this. They want to have, see equal justice and the idea that they utilize this to go after those who politically disagree with him is wrong.”
Think about that for a moment. The man who said, in the immediate aftermath of the events of January 6, 2021, that “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” now dismisses an effort to hold him responsible as a purely political act driven by a focus on the latest poll numbers.
Others within the GOP are singing from the same hymnal.
“It’s absolute bullshit,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. “That’s my reaction. This is the only way that the Democrats have to beat President Trump—is to arrest him, smear him, charge him with ridiculous charges, all in a cover-up of Joe Biden’s crimes, Hunter Biden’s crimes.”
Greene added, unnecessarily, that from this ignoble moment forward, “I’ll be standing with President Trump the entire way.” She didn’t specify the ultimate destination, but pretty clearly it will involve retribution. As Greene’s sometimes-contentious comrade in crazy, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, expressed it (after genuflecting at the altar of “DOJ is weaponized”), “President Trump will be re-elected in 2024 and I look forward to helping him gut the Deep State.”
Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas tweeted a similar sentiment, with lots of exclamation points: “STAND WITH TRUMP!! STAND WITH TRUMP!! Democrats KNOW they can’t beat Trump in 2024, so they’ve weaponized the FBI YET AGAIN to try to take him down. These people will deeply regret this when Trump is BACK in the White House!!” Will they ever!!
Meanwhile, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida signaled that he has no intention of waiting for the next election to bring out the long knives. “BREAKING: I will be introducing legislation to DEFUND Jack Smith’s witch hunt against President Trump,” Gaetz declared in a tweet. “They are attacking our democracy and engaging in election interference right now. The United States Congress has the capability to stop this election interference, and we must act immediately!”
There is nothing unusual about these reactions. The MAGA crowd flocks to them reflexively. The filing of criminal charges against Trump—for falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, attempting a coup and, to come, pressuring officials in Georgia to fabricate election results—corroborates their warped perception of Trump as a victim. It draws them to him even more.
Chris Lehmann, writing in the Nation, put it well: “Far from being defeated by subpoenas and indictments, the Trump movement draws an endlessly renewable sense of righteous retribution from the fable of its own persecution.”
Speaking of exclamation points, this is what Trump posted on his social media platform regarding the letter he received about his pending indictment:
WITCH HUNT!!! CROOKED JOE BIDEN & HIS INJUSTICE DEPARTMENT WANT TO INDICT & ARREST HIS PRESUMED POLITICAL OPPONENT (ME!), WHO IS LEADING HIM IN THE POLLS IN THE UPCOMING PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024. SUCH A THING HAS NEVER HAPPENED IN OUR COUNTRY BEFORE…AND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CAMPAIGN??? ELECTION INTERFERENCE & PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT!!!
Here, if you can stand it, are some of the images that were posted in response:
There were, it should be noted, also some anti-Trump messages that made it into the mix. Like, for instance, this:
As this maelstrom raged, the responses to the impending charges from Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination for president ran the gamut from stern finger-shaking to outright boot-licking.
The harshest reaction so far seems to come from former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who declared: “I have said from the beginning that Donald Trump’s actions on January 6 should disqualify him from ever being president again.” Hutchinson, who in the latest Morning Consult poll was weighing in at 0 percent, found it “disappointing” that the former president “refused” to abandon his campaign.
That’s telling him.
Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley brushed off the matter as a “distraction” while drawing the notice of the New York Times for not repeating what she said last month when Trump was indicted for hoarding top secret docs about “prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics.” That apparently represents a sea change in her willingness to go after Trump.
Meanwhile, the intrepid Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, straddled the fence, saying any charges would be “an attempt to criminalize politics and to try to criminalize differences,” while also clucking that Trump should have “come out more forcefully” to stop the supporters he incited into attacking the Capitol.
DeSantis is the kind of guy who saves his hardest punches for Mickey Mouse.
And Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who has positioned himself as the one GOP candidate in the race willing to say an unkind word about Trump, tweeted that he was waiting to see the indictment before commenting on the case, but said it wanted to be clear that “his conduct on January 6th proves he doesn’t care about our country & our Constitution.”
This prompted a commenter on Truth Social to write: “Go away fat boy! No one can stand your false bravado! You have no chance of ever being elected president! Your lack of interest in the rigged election proves that you don’t care about our Republic and our Constitution.”
On the other end of the spectrum, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has challenged the entire GOP field to pledge to pardon Trump should they somehow manage to beat him, was in full apologetic mode. “I would have made very different judgments than President Trump did, but a bad judgment is not a crime,” he told the Times via a spokesperson. “It’s a mistake to say he was responsible for Jan. 6. The real cause was systematic and pervasive censorship in the lead-up to those events.”
Ramaswamy also said, in a video shared with Fox News, “I do not want to see my opponents eliminated because of the actions of a corrupt federal administrative police state.” He is actually doing quite well in the polls, garnering 8 percent to Trump’s 55 percent.
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, in turn, used the opportunity to remind the nation of just how vast that totalitarian police state has become under Joe “Das Boot” Biden. “It doesn’t stop there,” Scott told Fox News, referring to Trump’s likely indictment. “It also includes parents who show up at school board meetings. They’re labeled domestic terrorists. We see folks who are pro-life activists, SWAT teams come into their homes guns drawn.” He promised to make this constant crushing government repression go away.
But the award for pusillanimity goes, as it so often the case, to former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump targeted for execution on January 6. “I believe that history will hold him to account for his actions that day,” Pence told NewsNation, adding that the judgment should be delivered by voters and not prosecutors.
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Pence said about a possible indictment. “I’m not convinced that the president acting on bad advice of a group of crank lawyers that came into the White House in the days before January 6 is actually criminal.”
And so the party of Lincoln slithers onward, terrified of the power of Donald Trump.
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