If being a convicted felon is so great for Donald Trump, why are Republicans freaking out?
The general response to Trump’s verdict has, in some ways, been a uniformly clear conspiratorial throwback to his two impeachments as well as the January 6 hearings: that all of this can be boiled down to a “Democratic witch hunt.” “This was a purely political exercise,” wrote House Speaker Mike Johnson, who got his job partly because of his own efforts to undermine the 2020 election. Gubernatorial loser and Senate candidate Kari Lake called the trial “a shameful political stunt.” “Little” Marco Rubio, a nickname Trump made famous, compared the proceedings to something that might happen in Cuba, where they don’t have jury trials: “This is what you see in communist countries.”
In fact, the notion that Trump’s trial is somehow fundamentally un-American seemed to be really high up on the list of GOP talking points. Florida governor Ron DeSantis called it a “kangaroo court,” as did Trump lapdog Ken Paxton. “This was a sham show trial,” said the Texas attorney general. “The Kangaroo Court will never stand on appeal.” Jim Jordan, a member of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government—which he’s repeatedly weaponized himself—also echoed: “The Manhattan kangaroo court shows what happens when our justice system is weaponized by partisan prosecutors in front of a biased judge with an unfair process.”
But while many Trump surrogates appeared to go about their messaging in lockstep, there were also some rather stark inconsistencies, suggesting that Trump’s verdict was not something that Republicans had a clear handle on.
In some ways, the political aftermath of the Trump trial is vaguely reminiscent of when the Access Hollywood video came out in 2016. At the time, Trumpworld fell into a great silence of uncertainty.