The GOP Allowed A Crook To Rise To Its Top & Now The Whole Party Is Turning Into A Crime Syndicate

Señor T appointed his daughter-in-law, Lara, head of the RNC so that he’d have a co-conspirator in his efforts to drain money from the organization. The RNC is supposed to play a broad role in supporting Republican candidates at all levels of government, fundraising for presidential, gubernatorial state legislative, mayoral, congressional and local elections. It solicits donations from individuals, corporations and other organizations to provide financial assistance, campaign resources, and infrastructure support to Republican candidates nationwide. They also coordinate with state and local party organizations to allocate resources and provide support to candidates based on strategic priorities and electoral needs, including targeted fundraising campaigns, voter outreach initiatives, and grassroots organizing efforts at every level of government. In the 2020 cycle they raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Throughout the cycle and its aftermath, they provided financial support for various legal efforts related to Trump's reelection campaign, including legal challenges, recounts and other litigation. The exact amount they spent on Trump's legal defense costs during the 2020 presidential cycle hasn’t been publicly disclosed in detail, as political committees often combine legal expenses with other operational expenditures in their financial reporting. However, it's well-documented that the RNC allocated significant resources to support Trump's legal efforts and defend the integrity of the election from the Republican Party's perspective.

But not nearly enough compared to what Trump was demanding. So he canned the chair, Ronna Romney McDaniel, brought in Lara and some other crooked schmuck from North Carolina he could control and had them revamp the committee. Into a piggy bank for himself. Yesterday on NBC, Lara said if RNC donors wanted to, they could “opt out” of their money going towards paying for Trump’s mounting legal bills. Sure they can. A team of ABC New reporters wrote that “The fine print on how that new joint committee is arranged suggests a priority is funneling money into the Trump campaign as well as a political action committee, Save America, that has paid a significant portion of Donald Trump's ongoing legal bills. One upcoming fundraiser for the new joint committee shows that Save America is ahead of groups like the RNC and 40 state party committees when it comes to the order for how donations are disbursed. Though legal bills make up nearly 80% of Save America's total expenditures so far this year, according to financial filings, a Trump spokesman said in a statement that Save America also ‘covers a very active and robust post-Presidency office and other various expenses.’ Lara Trump said on NBC that the RNC ‘does not support paying his legal bills, no.’ A previous effort to pass a formal resolution preventing that failed within the party, however. Having said before becoming co-chair that ‘every penny’ of the party's funds should be prioritized toward Donald Trump's reelection, Lara Trump has since modified that stance. On Wednesday, she appeared to take an expanded view of the party's responsibilities, noting that they'd also prioritize down-ballot races: ‘I will ensure that every penny of every dollar is going to causes that Republican voters care about.’” Sure she will.

In his column yesterday, Jonathan Chait wanted to make sure his readers haven’t forgotten that Trump is, first and foremost, a crook. Many Republicans who once knew it as surely as normal people know it, appear to have pushed it down the memory hole. “One of the reasons Republicans were so reluctant to accept Donald Trump’s nomination in 2016,” he wrote, “is that he was quite obviously a crook. ‘His business record reflects the often dubious norms of the milieu: using eminent domain to condemn the property of others; buying the good graces of politicians— including many Democrats— with donations,’ editorialized National Review. Marco Rubio lambasted him as a ‘con artist.’ The Wall Street Journal editorialized about Trump’s deep ties to the mafia and his fulsome praise of its work. (After Trump won the nomination, the Journal spiked a second editorial about his mob links.) Ted Cruz warned that an upcoming probe into Trump University, a scam Trump used to bilk unsuspecting fans by promising business secrets, would expose him to legal sanction. ‘If this man is the nominee, having the Republican nominee, on the stand in court, being cross-examined about whether he committed fraud, you don’t think the mainstream media will go crazy on that?’ The precise scenario Cruz predicted is finally occurring. The Republican response, however, is very different. The suspicion with which they once viewed Trump’s business career has dissipated. He is no longer a sleazy mobbed-up con artist but an innocent victim of overzealous prosecutors. The word Republicans now use almost uniformly to describe the former president’s travails with the justice system is ‘lawfare.’”

“Lawfare” means using the law as a weapon to get Trump. Conservatives ranging from the Trumpiest wing of the movement to the most Trump-skeptical— the ones who used to attack him as a crook— have all employed this term to describe the entire range of Trump’s legal problems, from his New York fraud conviction to his indictments in New York and Atlanta to both of Jack Smith’s federal cases.

The advantage of this catchall term is that it allows Trump’s defenders to ignore the specifics of Trump’s misconduct, or at least to analyze it in a highly selective way… It is a similar rhetorical strategy to the way Republicans dismissed the entire Russia scandal as “Russiagate” (or, in Trump’s preferred phrasing, “Russia, Russia, Russia”).

…By positing that Trump is the victim of a plot, all evidence of his guilt can be turned around into evidence of the sweeping nature of the conspiracy to smear him. Eventually, Republicans came to believe Trump had been the victim of a deep-state plot to frame him. Trump appointed a prosecutor, John Durham, to prove this conspiracy theory, only for Durham’s efforts to fail.

The right’s “lawfare” claim has some of the same elements. It posits that a wide array of jurists and prosecutors are working secretly in concert at Joe Biden’s behest. Of course, this theory requires one to ignore massive amounts of criminal behavior by Trump. (Nobody forced him to, say, refuse to relinquish classified documents and then order a cover up!) It likewise requires you to ignore the fact that Trump’s main legal antagonist, the Justice Department, has charged or investigated numerous Democrats, including the president’s son.

The common thread between the right’s conspiratorial view of the Russia scandal and his legal problems is that Trump is, in fact, a very dishonest and corrupt person. The misconduct at the root of both dramas is not fantastical or unique. Russians have frequently manipulated or gained leverage over foreign politicians, though relatively few of them have been American. It is likewise not uncommon for politicians to commit crimes. The impression that all politicians are crooks— which Trump has exploited to justify his own corruption— is surely a wild exaggeration, but the stereotype exists in part because many of them are.

What’s unusual about Trump is not that a politician got into legal trouble, or even that a professional scammer went into politics, but that a political party allowed a crook to rise to its top. That, in turn, reveals the deeply unhealthy state of the GOP, not any extralegal steps being taken by his opponents.

Before he won the Republican nomination the first time, Republicans were perfectly aware that his decades of bilking customers and counterparties, lying to everybody, and surrounding himself with known criminals posed a series legal risk. Now that that risk has gone from theoretical to actual, and it is being shared by the Republican Party, they seem to believe it’s not fair to hold him legally accountable.

But no plot was necessary here. The law finally catching up to a lifelong crook is utterly predictable.