Jamie Raskin (D-MD): “Three years after his corrupt presidency ended in a massive loss to Joe Biden, insurrectionary violence, bipartisan impeachment and a 57-43 Senate vote for conviction, Donald Trump just made history again as the first-ever former U.S. President to be convicted of felony criminal offenses— 34 to be exact. But Trump is still the presumptive nominee of the GOP for president. This is a perilous moment for America as we reenter the fight of our lives under radically changed circumstances. The stakes could be no higher, as MAGA and its leader call the unanimous jury verdict ‘rigged’ and continue to attack and savage the rule of law. Trump doesn’t even pretend to be offering policy proposals for America and offers no vision of a unified democratic nation. An aspiring authoritarian dictator and a charlatan hustler, he offers nothing but political revenge, contempt, seething hatred, propaganda, and demolition of the rule of law and civil liberties. There is nothing left in his message but the lust for total power and total vengeance and the will to say and do anything to get it. Now, it is our historic assignment to make sure this twice-impeached, criminally-convicted, Inciter-in-Chief never gets anywhere near the Oval Office ever again.”
On Thursday, before the jury’s stunning verdict had been made public, former Maryland Governor— and current Senate candidate— Larry Hogan (R) made a sensible statement on his Twitter feed: “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.” At one point such an uncontroversial statement like that would have hardly have been noticed. MAGA, however, doesn’t find it uncontroversial. One of Trump’s top advisors tweeted a threat right back to him:
There is no middle ground for Trump here. He needs every Republican to stick to the script, if not in as deranged a manner as the lunatics like Moscow Marge (“I’ll be voting for President Trump on November 5th whether he is a free man or a prisoner of the Biden regime”), Michael Cloud (R-TX), Matt Gaetz (“a stain on our nation and our justice system… the outgrowth of a rigged, corrupt process”), JD Vance (“isn’t justice, it’s election interference”), Mike Collins (R-GA), Gym Jordan (“travesty of justice”), and Thomas Massie (R-KY) then with the fake outrage of people like McConnell: “These charges never should have been brought in the first place. I expect the conviction to be overturned on appeal.”
An OpEd aimed at American Jews yesterday by Jay Michaelson in The Forward caught my attention. The title, “How much more injustice will Trump’s Jewish supporters tolerate?” was somewhat ambiguous and open to interpretation. The subtitle wasn’t: “If we put up with criminality, we have sold our Jewish birthright for a bowl of nationalist porridge.”
Michaelson went right to the heart of how Jews see themselves. This isn’t something your typical evangelical MAGAt or Tennessee snake-handler will have to contemplate but “Now that Donald Trump is a convicted felon, many American Jews face a difficult moral choice. Is support for Israel’s right-wing government more important than the rule of law and American democracy as we know it? Are there any red lines left? These are not idle questions. [Israeli genocidal billionaire] Miriam Adelson, according to a report in Politico, is set to fund a Super PAC supporting Trump’s election bid to the tune of over $90 million. As the eighth-richest woman in the world, Adelson has the power to shift the presidential race singlehandedly. (To be clear, SuperPACs should not exist, donations of this size should be illegal, money is not speech, and the appalling wealth gap enabled by the GOP’s welfare-for-the-ultra-rich policies is a moral stain on our society. But moving on.) And in addition to continued tax breaks for her and her businesses, we know from Adelson’s statements that Israel is atop her list of policy expectations.”
Michaelson went on to remind his mostly very pro-Israel readers that “a lot hangs in this particular balance. According to Project 2025, the plan for Trump’s presidency drafted by the Heritage Foundation and embraced by many in Trump’s orbit, the second Trump administration would involve mass deportations and concentration camps, weaponizing the Justice Department to go after political opponents, reversing all of Biden’s actions on climate change, and strengthening executive power to its greatest level in all of American history. It is an embrace of authoritarianism in the service of American ultra-nationalism. And the man set to execute this plan is a convicted felon who continues, to this day, to lie to the American people about what he did and to undermine the due process of law which found him guilty of doing it. Never in American history has a man with so much power sown so much distrust of fundamental American institutions. A third of the country is in his thrall. We’re ready for civil war, they say, over and over again. And they have the guns.”
Jewish supporters of Trump are a little different. Some are in the MAGA camp, but many more have a more transactional relationship with the former president. They hold their noses at the scandals, the dinners with neo-Nazis, and the antisemitic conspiracy theories, so long as Trump delivers for Israel. Or, more specifically, Israel’s interests as understood by the American and Israeli Right: unconditional military and financial aid, support for the settlement project and the vision of ‘Greater Israel,’ and, now, absolute deference to the Netanyahu government’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.
…The predominant right-wing response to Trump’s conviction has been predictable: denial. As I’ve written about in several contexts lately, there are at least two kinds of denial in cases like this: dishonest denial and actual, psychological denial. I wonder which is more prevalent now. Do Trump’s defenders know in their hearts that he did it— that he cheated on his wife, had sex with the adult film star, paid her off so Americans wouldn’t find out about it during the 2016 election, and then lied about the payoffs in his business records— but still defend him because Israel comes first?
Or are they actually in denial themselves? Have they gone so far down the road with this transparently obvious con artist that the cognitive dissonance of accepting the truth about Trump’s misdeeds is so great that they’ll believe any preposterous story that avoids it?
This is what the concept of cognitive dissonance is all about. Rather than accept that the Bible isn’t literally true, fundamentalists believe that God buried the dinosaur bones to test our faith. Rather than accept that Americans voted Donald Trump out of office, MAGA devotees insist that the 2020 election was rigged. (After being convicted, Donald Trump said Thursday night that “our whole country is being rigged.”) Rather than accept that social mores are evolving, the New Apostolic Reformation (the folks who brought Mrs. Alito’s beloved “Appeal to Heaven” flag back into vogue) believes that demons are possessing our entire population.
So Trump didn’t have sex with Stormy Daniels, didn’t steal classified documents from the White House, didn’t use racist slurs back in The Apprentice days (even though it’s apparently caught on tape), didn’t alter a map of a hurricane’s path with a Sharpie, didn’t say that COVID-19 would just “go away” 38 times between February and December 2020, didn’t stiff his own contractors and lawyers over a period of 30 years, didn’t know anything about the repeated eruptions of Nazi imagery in his own advertisements, didn’t incite the rioters on Jan. 6, and doesn’t even wear makeup or have a combover. It’s all just a liberal conspiracy.
All this is easier, psychologists tell us, than to admit the truth: that for the sake of Israel, some American Jews will put up with absolutely anything. Even white supremacists, even felony convictions stemming from an adulterous affair and continued lies about it, even the vulgarizing of our public discourse to a degree that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
In 2016, Trump once quipped that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would still rally behind him. Is this true, I wonder, of his Jewish supporters? Is there no red line that he could yet cross?
Deuteronomy 16:20 commands “Justice, Justice, shall you pursue, so that you may live, and inherit the land which God has given you.” Notice the conditional: justice is not merely a positive moral virtue, but a necessary condition of fulfilling our destinies, and of life itself. If we’re willing to sacrifice that — if we rationalize Trump’s criminality and contempt for the law — then we have lost what we’re trying to protect. For the sake of a nationalist bowl of porridge, we will have given away our birthright as Jews.
Wisconsin Republican Derrick Van Orden is a loud-mouthed drunken bully with not an iota of patriotism despite— he will tell you at the drop of a hat— having served in the armed forces. And not Jewish— more like a concentration camp guard. Yesterday, WisPolitics.com reproduced a statement— with the exact, word-for-word talking points handed out by Mar-a-Lago— made after the verdict was read out: “It is a dark day for our nation. I am truly disgusted by the verdict that has affirmed the sham prosecution of the Democrats’ political opponent. This decision by Democrats to institute a two-tiered system of justice has now put the United States on the same level as the Soviet Union. I remain committed to supporting President Donald J. Trump to victory in November and ensuring our justice system is held accountable for the clear bias they have presented through this process. This will not stand.” Will his desecration of the American flag stand?
He added, using more Mar-a-Lago talking points, that Señor T’s “trial and verdict is shameful, disgusting, and un-American. The Democratic Party is shredding the fabric of our nation in real time. This is the highest profile political hit job in the history of our nation and will not end well for America. Help us fight this.”
Writing for the NY Times late Thursday, Jesse McKinley and Kate Christobek reported that MAGAdonia is seething. Trump may have appeared subdued after the jury found him guilty but the “sedate mask fell away” very quickly. “After he left the courtroom, he expressed disgust at the verdict in the hallway and suggested that voters would punish Democrats at the ballot box… Allies chimed in. [American Nazi] Charlie Kirk… suggested that Republican district attorneys should investigate Democrats. ‘How many Republican DAs or AG’s have stones?’ he said in an online post, adding, ‘Indict the left, or lose America.’”
They added that the country “is now in uncharted waters [but that] It’s too early to know how the verdict will affect the presidential campaign. Nothing in the Constitution prevents a felon from serving as president. Both Trump and President Biden immediately tried to capitalize on the guilty verdict in fund-raising emails, including one from Trump declaring ‘JUSTICE IS DEAD IN AMERICA!’ and calling himself ‘a political prisoner.’ Biden also posted a fund-raising appeal shortly after the verdict: ‘There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box.’ Whether the conviction will resonate with voters in November is impossible to predict. One thing is certain: Trump’s conviction will test the American people, and the nation’s fealty to the rule of law.”
ABC News reported that, unlike Hogan, virtually all Republican politicians are staying loyal to the cult leader. “The party of ‘law and order,’ wrote Avery Harper, “is undoubtedly moving toward nominating a convicted felon to be atop its presidential ticket. And prominent voices within the Republican Party are rallying around him. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson called Thursday ‘a shameful day in American history.’ Sen. Marco Rubio, a potential contender for Trump's VP pick, called the verdict a ‘travesty that makes a mockery of our system of justice.’ Former HUD Secretary under Trump, Ben Carson, insisted the ‘judicial system has been weaponized to go after Presidents for political gain.’”
Florida Republican Brian Mast posted the Mar-a-Lago talking points— but with his own sick twist— “America's Judicial System. Killed in Action. May 30, 2024.” What’s with this freak, I asked Thomas Witkop, Mast’s Democratic opponent. “He always puts things in military terms like in a recent email that said ‘I need reinforcements’ regarding a protest happening outside his office regarding the war in Gaza. Fortunately, no one came to back him up while the protestors chanted outside his office. Applying military lingo to a democratically held office seems off to me... We're not at war with another party or any Americans.”
Long Island freshman Nick LaLota tries passing himself off as a very different kind of Republican than a crackpot like Van Orden and, having more than a 2-digit IQ, he doesn’t copy the talking points word-for-word. But he got across the same MAGA message.
Nancy Goroff, the full-fledged Democrat and district resident (unlike her primary opponent who is neither) was quick to respond so that Suffolk County independents and swing voters wouldn’t just be hearing the deceitful MAGA messaging being spread across the country by Trump sycophants like LaLota:
