‘I Want To See Lists of Which Democrats Are Going to Prison’
In the wake of Trump’s conviction, Republicans are having a normal one.
It’s a different world than the one we woke up in yesterday: Donald Trump has been convicted on all charges in his New York hush money/business records trial. The rest of the cases against him might not be wrapped up before the November election—or ever, if he wins. And he’s certain to appeal, as he has every right to do—and may even prevail on that appeal. Even so, Trump will still be carrying a historic new title into the election: felon.
For those who have watched Trump’s decade-long rampage through our institutions with dismay, there’s a palpable sense of relief—even a temptation to schadenfreude. But we think Adam Kinzinger said it well in his piece for the site last night:
It is a sad day for our nation. . . . If we worry about our standing in the world—and we should—this isn’t a point of pride. Despite this verdict, America still looks like so many struggling democracies, where strongmen violate laws and bend the system to their will. The anti-Trump coalition, this uneasy and awkward alliance, must stand together, united to defend the sanctity of our system and the presidency.
Strap in, folks: It’s a long, bumpy road to November. Happy Friday.
‘This is the Final Battle’
Republicans, as you’d imagine, are taking the news very well.
As is often the case these days, GOP reactions to the verdict took place in pro-Trump split-screen: 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.
Shortly after the verdict was announced, Trump posted a video to social media with audio from a recent rally set to ominous music: “This is the final battle,” he said in voiceover:
With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. And we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.
The Federalist’s Sean Davis has some thoughts on how Trump might go about doing that: “In 2016, the presidential race was decided based on candidates releasing lists of potential Supreme Court nominees,” he tweeted. “In 2024, I want to see lists of which Democrat officials are going to be put in prison. This is what happens when you cross the Rubicon.”
Davis went on: “Biden and Garland should be indicted in Texas tomorrow for their ongoing criminal human trafficking conspiracy across the border and into the state of Texas, in direct contravention of state law.”
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh was thinking on a similar track: “Donald Trump should make and publish a list of ten high ranking Democrat criminals who he will have arrested when he takes office. First on the list should be Joe Biden. Second should be Joe’s crackhead son.”
Or here was lawyer Mike Davis, a pro-Trump attack dog whom Donald Trump Jr. has floated as a possible pick for attorney general in a second Trump term: “Dear Republicans: If your response to Biden’s Republic-ending lawfare against Trump is: 1. We must respect the process and/or 2. We are too principled to retaliate, please do two things: 1. Fuck off 2. Leave the party. You are too weak, stupid, and dangerous to keep around.”
“Import the Third World, become the Third World,” tweeted Tucker Carlson. “That’s what we just saw. This won’t stop Trump. He’ll win the election if he’s not killed first. But it does mark the end of the fairest justice system in the world. Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family.”
Elected Republicans mostly stayed in the po-faced camp. But what was most striking about their statements was how quickly they came out. “Today is a shameful day in American history,” House Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted minutes after the verdict. “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.”
“This verdict is a disgrace, and this trial should have never happened,” Sen. John Cornyn, a candidate for the top Senate GOP job once Mitch McConnell steps down, tweeted just minutes later. “Now more than ever, we need to rally around @realdonaldtrump, take back the White House, and get this country back on track.”
About an hour after that, Sen. John Thune—Cornyn’s top rival for the top job—weighed in too. “I’ve been on a flight, but I just landed and saw the news,” Thune wrote. “This case was politically motivated from the beginning, and today’s verdict does nothing to absolve the partisan nature of this prosecution. Regardless of outcome, more and more Americans are realizing we cannot survive four more years of Joe Biden.”
These GOP leaders may have been wise to get their statements out quick. Team Trump was stalking the party fence last night, ready to purge anyone who got off message.
Here, for instance, was Larry Hogan, the centrist former governor of Maryland and Trump skeptic who is Republicans’ best hope to win a Maryland Senate seat in years: “Regardless of the result, I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process. At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders—regardless of party—must not pour fuel on the fire with more toxic partisanship. We must reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”
Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita responded: “You just ended your campaign.”
—Andrew Egger
It’s getting ugly out there, but you can count on us to see you through: Reporting the truth as we know it, in good faith, without fear. We hope you’ll join us.
So What Now?
Will conviction be a 2024 inflection point?
We discussed this question on the Bulwark livestream last night. It was a lively and thought-provoking session—take a look if you have a moment.
But I’ll admit the upshot of our back and forth was this: We don’t know. As so often with Trump, we’re in uncharted waters.
But I was one of those who argued last night that it could be an inflection point, and I’m even more inclined to this view this morning. For one thing, I’m encouraged by the over-the-top hysteria we’re seeing from MAGA world. It suggests worry, even panic. And in any case, there’s nothing like the squealing of stuck pigs (along with your first cup of coffee) to cheer you up in the morning.
I should note that the hysteria is of course accompanied with quite extraordinary cravenness. Andrew mentioned above the statement from Thune, the number two Republican in the Senate who’s desperately hoping to succeed Mitch McConnell as number one. Thune’s obligatory denunciation of the verdict, tweeted around 7:00 pm last night, was prefaced with this sentence: “I’ve been on a flight, but just landed and saw the news.”
In other words: Thune was terrified that Trump or his consiglieres would notice that he’d been missing from the torrent of Stalinist professions of faith in Leader Trump over the preceding two hours. Would they hold it against him? Please no. “I’ve been on a flight,” he desperately explained. I’m so sorry. I would have abased myself earlier. I should have. I’m terribly sorry not to have done so, My Leader.
But let’s turn away from such distasteful scenes of mob hysteria and individual groveling.
Let me say a word about infection points.
Inflection points don’t inflect themselves. We have to act to make certain moments inflection points.
Later on, long after the struggle is over, commentators will say this or that moment was an inflection point. But it only became an inflection point because people at the time, in real time, made it an inflection point.
So Trump has been found guilty by a jury of his peers of 34 felony counts. But it’s up to the rest of us to make sure our fellow citizens know this, understand this, grasp the significance of this. It’s up to us to make sure Trump and his apparatchiks don’t succeed in gaslighting Americans about this.
And the most important voice in this effort can be the man who stands between Trump and his effort to retake the presidency, the current president of the United States.
Biden should step up to the moment. He doesn’t need to opine on the details of the legal case, except to profess his faith in the judicial system and his respect for our fellow citizens who served on the jury. He doesn’t have to engage with the hysterical Trump defenders, except to deplore their dangerous demagoguery and un-American attacks on our legal and judicial system.
But he has the right, and the duty, to explain the meaning of the moment.
A couple of days ago, in anticipation of the verdict, I wrote that:
The campaign—or at least allied outside groups—need to engage in a comprehensive effort to bring home to Americans what a jury of Trump’s peers has found. They need to remind Americans, over and over, that such a finding is unprecedented in the case of an ex-president. They need to say that it disqualifies him from the presidency. And this can’t be one speech by the president or a token ad or a few clever remarks by surrogates on social media. June is the month when convicted felon can get stamped across Trump’s forehead. But this won’t happen without a concerted effort to make it happen.
And the leader of that concerted effort should surely be Biden. Perhaps he could begin by following Trump’s scheduled appearance this morning with his own statement on camera? Perhaps he should remind us that Trump slept with a porn star and illegally tried to cover it up because he thought it would hurt his election prospects? Perhaps he should point out that this behavior is part of a pattern of Trump’s contempt for the law that makes him unfit to be president?
And while pointing out he’s never debated a convicted felon before, and that he wishes the Republican party had chosen someone other than a convicted felon as its nominee, perhaps he could emphasize that he looks forward to explaining this all directly to the convicted felon in their debate on June 27?
Trump’s conviction could be an inflection point for Trump. But if Biden rises to the occasion, it could also be an inflection point for Biden. He should speak not as head of the Democratic party. He should speak not as the incumbent president defending every detail of his record. He should speak as the defender of the rule of law and the greatness of our democratic form of government. He should speak for America.
—William Kristol
Ron to the Rescue
Florida limits felons’ ability to vote, but newly convicted Trump will almost certainly be able to vote for himself in November—even if he’s stuck in a New York prison and has to cast a mail-in ballot from the clink.
Florida’s Republican lawmakers are all but certain to guarantee it.
Under the state’s constitution, the governor and Florida cabinet have the right to restore a felon’s voting rights, and Florida’s elected CFO Jimmy Patronis and Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson say they’re ready to grant Trump clemency at breakneck speed. Gov. Ron DeSantis couldn’t be reached, but he’s likely to go along with the plan, as is the state’s attorney general, Ashley Moody.
Patronis said he’s ready to act when he, Simpson, and Moody—who together make up the entirety of DeSantis’s cabinet—have their regularly scheduled meeting in their role as the state Clemency Board in two weeks. That will take place before Trump is even sentenced in the Manhattan hush-money case on July 11. Normally, clemency applicants have to finish the terms of their sentence before they qualify to get their voting rights restored in Florida. But Patronis said Trump’s case is different due to the “weaponization of the courts” against the GOP’s candidate, who hails from Florida. The Clemency Board can always change its rules, Patronis said, and if there is some statutory hiccup, he said the Florida legislature should come back into special session to fix the problem.
“I intend on trying to do everything possible I can to get this behind us as soon as possible,” Patronis said, echoing similar comments from Simpson. “We’re obligated as citizens of the state of Florida, where the nominee is coming from for the Republican Party, in order to ensure [former] President Trump gets to vote.”
Civil rights advocates say it’s an irony that Republican lawmakers, who crusade as tough-on-crime opponents of felons’ voting rights, would go to these lengths for Trump.
If the Clemency Board acts, it might be more of a demonstration of loyalty than a consequential action. Even without the Clemency Board doing anything more on his behalf, Trump is likely to be able to vote in November for two reasons: 1) a convicted felon is allowed to still vote while his case is on appeal (and Trump is appealing), and 2) Trump would only be prohibited from voting in Florida for his New York conviction if New York banned felons from voting. New York does not have that limitation, unless the convict is incarcerated. But if Florida’s clemency board restores Trump’s voting rights, he could be allowed to vote in prison.
“It’s truly a Florida oddity, but I guess it’s possible,” said Howard Simon, a crusader for voting rights in Florida, where he led the ACLU for decades.
—Marc Caputo
Quick Hits: The Lawyers Weigh In
In addition to the Kinzinger piece we mentioned up top (go read it!), we’ve also got a piece up this morning from former federal prosecutors Donald Ayer and Dennis Aftergut that’s well worth your time:
Accountability for Trump’s misdeeds is all the more important given that the U.S. Supreme Court, with its right-wing majority, is AWOL from its most basic tasks: seeking equal justice under law and winning public trust in a prudent and steady system of rules not subject to radical revision based on the whims of recent appointees. The Manhattan case and Trump’s conviction show the strength of our legal process and traditions, and make clear that in one very important corner of our federal system, justice can prevail even in the face of great challenges.
Prominent among those challenges: Trump’s efforts to derail the case by daily public attacks—including against Justice Juan Merchan and his family. Despite the pressure, Merchan oversaw as careful and balanced a proceeding as one could imagine. He bent over backwards to avoid jailing Trump for his contemptuous violations of the court’s restrictions on speaking against witnesses. What we observed defied Trump’s complaints that the trial was rigged, that the judge hated him, and that his rights were abused. Far from it. A New York appellate court has already rejected Trump’s attempt to have Justice Merchan disqualified because of supposed “conflicts” that Trump exaggerated or outright made up.
Nothing about the case remotely supports Trump’s crowning lie that it was all a plot to get him and deny him his basic rights. Trump was in fact accorded every right that defendants can have in our system. That included his engagement of a highly qualified legal team that hotly contested every issue before both the jury and the court. By all accounts, the jury paid close attention throughout the proceeding. The administration of justice operated superbly in the face of Trump’s determined efforts to subvert it.
Despite Trump’s steady stream of falsehoods and the distortions and disinformation pushed by his allies, the mainstream media successfully communicated to the public the facts proven in a court of law. Polls conducted while the trial was underway found that nearly 80 percent of Americans had heard about it and some 56 percent of the public believed from reporting of the untelevised trial that Trump had criminally falsified records to hide information from voters in the immediate runup to the 2016 election. The jury affirmed their understanding.
As JVL wrote before the verdict, if you believe in the rule of law, you believe in the process, not just the outcome. And it bears saying: It isn’t only MAGA psychos who think there were procedural issues on display at this trial that may redound to Trump’s benefit on appeal. (This is why we have appeals: to kick the tires on the process.) In New York magazine, former federal and state prosecutor Elie Honig has the strongest articulation of that case we’ve seen:
By any reasonable measure, the jury of Manhattanites who yesterday found former president Donald Trump guilty on all 34 charges did its job, and did it well.
They took on a civic duty from which many others fled; during jury selection, when Judge Juan Merchan allowed potential jurors who did not want to serve essentially to walk out the door, over half the assembled pool headed straight for the exits. The jurors sat through six weeks of testimony, they were by all accounts attentive throughout the trial, and they asked precise, insightful questions of the judge during deliberations. Nobody’s truly in position to say if the jury got it right or wrong; they saw the evidence and we didn’t — most of us, that is, including those like me who followed every line of testimony as it happened; there’s no substitute for seeing it play out live. Reasonable minds could have come out either way, and this jury found that the prosecution carried its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury’s work, and their verdict, deserve respect.
But that doesn’t mean that every structural infirmity around the Manhattan district attorney’s case has evaporated. Both of these things can be true at once: The jury did its job, and this case was an ill-conceived, unjustified mess. Sure, victory is the great deodorant, but a guilty verdict doesn’t make it all pure and right. Plenty of prosecutors have won plenty of convictions in cases that shouldn’t have been brought in the first place. “But they won” is no defense to a strained, convoluted reach unless the goal is to “win,” now, by any means necessary and worry about the credibility of the case and the fallout later.
Seriously: Read the whole thing. Honig shows his work and makes his case point by point. You might not be convinced, but at least you’ll have a good preview of Trump’s appeal. And let us know what you think.
< takes deep breath >
Every single one of these punks who are mouthing off about lists of Democrats who should go to prison are telling on themselves. Whether they wish to admit it or not, Trump has humiliated every one of them. Every one of them knew back in 2015 what Trump was, but they backed him anyway because they hated Hillary Clinton so much. And now they're all compromised and complicit, and reduced to carrying water for an adjudicated rapist, fraudster, and convicted felon because they cannot ever admit they were wrong to support him to begin with.
Let me be clear: only the weak support Trump. Sean Davis is weak. Matt Walsh is weak. Mike Davis is weak. And in a better world, these so-called men would pay a severe price for their malevolence. Until we live in that world, mock the shit out of them.
The Federalist’s Sean Davis has some thoughts on how Trump might go about doing that: “In 2016, the presidential race was decided based on candidates releasing lists of potential Supreme Court nominees,” he tweeted. “In 2024, I want to see lists of which Democrat officials are going to be put in prison. This is what happens when you cross the Rubicon.”
I guess 2016's LOCK HER UP wasn't enough for this guy. I bet, in 2016, Sean Davis never would have guessed what type of person he really was.
The meltdown among the rightwing commentariat is all total bad faith. All this preening and peacocking, and none of them believe the vituperations coming out of their mouths. You know how I know? Find me one of these people who said what they're now saying when Michael Cohen went to prison over this same scheme. Where was the sanctimony over miscarriages of justice and third world corruption then, when the DOJ under the Trump administration went after Cohen? Who cried or called for retribution over him? Why weren't these people saying Cohen's prosecution was a political scandalization of the justice system? Did they suddenly get religion on this stuff? Or is it because Cohen was a turncoat? If you find me one person who said then about Cohen what they're saying now about Trump, I'll take them seriously. But for everyone who does not match that description, sit the fuck down. You don't believe a word you're saying, and you are cynically destroying our democracy for likes on Twitter.