Even before and especially in the wake of Trump’s guilty verdict, members of the MAGAt Party has stumbled over themselves to declare fealty to Donald Trump, and in the process to demean rule of law.
Chris Hayes described the process as a mob style pressure campaign.
This enforcement action is happening because the Trump people and the Fox people and most of the people in the upper echelons of the party understand: the only way to bring Trump down, to end his political career, is if Republicans turn against him.
As long as they stay unified, no matter what he does, no matter how abhorrent, or how dangerous, or how criminal, or how vile, no matter how much of a threat he is to the nation, if they all band together, then in a polarized landscape, they can basically keep him afloat and make it essentially a coin toss.
That is why they dressed up like him during the trial and rushed to debase themselves in cringe-inducing fashion on any live TV camera they can find.
[snip]
There have only been two times in Trump’s political career where that dynamic of Republican unanimity has broken, where Trump was near political death.
One was in the aftermath of January 6, the violent assault on the Capitol that he stirred up, when everyone was criticizing him, when the blood was still on the floor of the Capitol including Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy. Remember that? Trump’s approval rating dropped below 40%, about the lowest level it reached. Mitch McConnell was testing the waters for a vote for an impeachment conviction.
If it had not been for that man, Mitch McConnell’s abject, enduringly pathetic cowardice and McCarthy’s relentless quest to have the third shortest speakership in history — not to mention the legitimate fear Republican senators had for their families about violence — we wouldn’t have this issue now. They could have just voted to convict him and bar him from future office. Done.
Ironically enough, the other time — the other sort of near political death experience — was in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape. And just about every elected Republican tried to distance themselves and criticize him. Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus was even considering how to get him off of the ticket.
But Trump managed to hold it together, due in no small part to the fact that right at that moment, he got a guy named Michael Cohen, his lawyer, to pay to keep the porn star from talking. And so the Republicans never heard about that story, nor did the public, which could have been the political death blow.
The lesson he learned is if you enforce this totalitarian unanimity, you can keep chugging along.
Journalists not named Chris Hayes are covering this too.
But they’re covering it differently.
Like this 1,400-word story from WaPo yesterday.
It describes that Republicans are backing Trump’s false claims of victimhood. It quotes at least twelve Republicans undermining the verdict, most in inflammatory terms. It even notes, in lukewarm fashion, that Trump’s claims of victimhood have no basis.
But even though it gives ample platform to Bible-thumper Mike Johnson to screech, it doesn’t use the word “porn,” opting instead for “hush money.” It doesn’t use the word “fraud,” opting instead to describe “falsifying business records.”
If you were Martian dropping onto the Earth to learn what the hubbub was about, you would never know that the Speaker who claims to live by the Ten Commandments was running cover for a guy who paid $400,000 to cover up fucking a porn star while his spouse was home with his youngest kid.
This one, also close to 1,400 words, is worse. It doesn’t even mention what crime Trump was convicted of (it links to a piece describing that Trump was, “falsifying business records to conceal alleged affairs.”
Donald Trump — in the form of his University, his charity, his real estate empire, and finally his biological person — has been adjudged a fraudster over and over. Along the way there’s the lady he assaulted in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room and the porn star he fucked who, he said, reminded him of his oldest daughter.
And almost nowhere, along the way, are journalists asking Republicans — or simply stating as fact — that the entire party has decided to apologize for fraud and fucking porn stars.
The press is giving Republicans a pass for conducting a wholesale assault on rule of law. Republicans are disavowing almost every thing they claim to stand for — and when you throw in the 140 cops assaulted on January 6, it would include everything — and yet the sordid details of what Trump actually did have disappeared.
Trump paid $400,000 to cover up fucking a porn star; he grossed it up to make sure it he’d kill the story in time.
It’s not just that Republicans are enforcing totalitarian unanimity in supporting Trump for fucking a porn star and covering it up. But that din of slavering Republicans debasing themselves to Donald Trump has silenced coverage about what it is Trump was found to have done.
Trump paid $400,000 to cover up fucking a porn star. Make the Bible-thumpers own that when they rush to defend him.