Susan Collins’s Really Dumb Trump Defense Reveals the GOP’s Sickness
Michael Tomasky
Fri, May 31, 2024
The only thing that was more fun yesterday than watching the Trump verdict come in was watching Republicans and assorted right-wingers sputter in outrage. I flipped on Fox News not long after the verdict was announced and caught Jeanine Pirro in the middle of an unhinged rant. “We have gone over a cliff in America,” she howled, concluding: “And in the end, with all this smoke and mirrors, at 34 counts, and a hooker, and a guy [who] according to a federal judge is a serial perjurer, we have convicted a former president of the United States of America.”
In a way, she got that last part right, even if her description of Stormy Daniels is unfair. But yes, Jeanine: That’s how the legal system works. If a jury returns 34 guilty counts in less than 10 hours of deliberation, it’s pretty clear that the prosecutor made his case. The jury of Donald Trump’s peers found Daniels and Michael Cohen to be credible witnesses. That must really frost the MAGA elites on Fox. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche tried and tried to discredit them, especially Cohen. Obviously, the jury wasn’t buying what he was selling.
And by the way: If Cohen and Daniels were such terrible witnesses, you know what action by the defense could have immediately canceled them out? Having Trump take the stand! He threatened that he was going to, but that was obviously bullshit, just like everything he says. Trump can’t take a witness stand, as any credible lawyer knows, because he lies every time he opens his jowly mouth. But if the alternate universe they live in on Fox was real, then Trump should definitely have taken the stand, because he would have obliterated Cohen and Daniels with his righteous truth-telling.
But of course he didn’t. Because every word he has said about this is a lie. He had sex with her. He paid her off. It was obviously about the 2016 campaign. We’ve known all these things for years, but, the law being what it is, we had to say “allegedly” and “if proven” and things like that, and we had to print Trump’s disavowals. Now we don’t. He did it.
Not in that alternate universe, though. Republicans … well, you know what they did after the verdict. Especially the vice presidential supplicants. Senator Tim Scott was maybe the most extreme, but actually all of them—Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Elise Stefanik, J.D. Vance, and more—were over the top.
That, we’d expect. More interesting were the elder statespersons of the party, who are to a person moral cowards but aren’t exactly card-carrying MAGA-heads. Senator John Barrasso: “The case in New York against President Trump has never been about justice. Democrats are weaponizing the justice system against a political opponent.” Mitch McConnell: “These charges never should have been brought in the first place. I expect the conviction to be overturned on appeal.”
But the dumbest of them all was Susan Collins’s statement, especially this part: “The district attorney, who campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump, brought these charges precisely because of who the defendant was rather than because of any specified criminal conduct.”
She got pounded on X/Twitter all night. It’s pretty hard to say that criminal charges are corrupt and illegitimate after a jury handed down an unequivocal thunderclap of a verdict like that. We should pause for a moment and think about the contempt for the justice system inherent in Collins’s words. Maybe she became disillusioned after her buddy Brett Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe.
Her smear of Alvin Bragg is a common one on the right. The reality is more complicated. Bragg was running for district attorney in 2021. Of course, Trump came up during the campaign—a lot. The incumbent D.A. at the time, Cy Vance, had opened an investigation into the Trump Organization. So naturally, Bragg and his main opponent were frequently asked what they’d do about Trump. And Bragg did boast about his prior work in the office of the state attorney general bringing “hundreds” of actions against Trump. But he did not say he was going to pursue Trump, and the campaign also turned on other issues.
And when Bragg did take office, what did he do? He ended the Trump Organization probe that Vance had opened. Two of his top prosecutors resigned in disgust over it. That probe was taken up by Letitia James, and it resulted, as we know, in a judge ruling that Trump had committed fraud for years and levying a hefty fine.
One has to wonder why Collins went out of her way to make this kind of statement. Maine isn’t exactly MAGA-land. She’s probably in her last term. On a personal level, Trump probably has very little use for her, and she probably doesn’t care much for him. So … why?
Because the cancer runs so deep now in the organs of the Republican Party that no officeholder is cancer-free. Did one GOP officeholder say we should respect the jury system? Yes, I know of Larry Hogan’s statement. But he is not currently an officeholder, with constituents to offend. And look at what Trump’s campaign manager said in response to Hogan. That guarantees that no one else will try to say anything measured.
The party is an appendage of one man. Republicans want to talk about banana republics? They are the Banana Republicans. This is like Argentina under Perón or the Philippines under Marcos.
And to what manner of man are they appended? Let’s review. He’s a rapist—yes, a judge used that word and said it was accurate, after, remember, another jury of Trump’s peers ruled against him. He’s a massive tax cheat. Six of his political associates, plus Allen Weisselberg (and Cohen, if you want to count him), have been sentenced to prison. Three took plea deals to avoid prison. And now, he’s a convicted felon.
The emperor is stripped barer and barer with each passing month, and the Republican response is to praise his finery more passionately than ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment