Immediately after a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records on Thursday—making him the first president to be a convicted criminal—Fox News described the verdict as “warfare” while descending into full freakout mode.
The conservative cable giant’s hosts and pundits didn’t just stop there, though. Besides suggesting that Trump’s conviction amounted to war, the right-wing network’s personalities also fumed that it could lead to the “undoing of our country” and represented America going “over a cliff.”
Shortly after the verdict was released, which resulted in loud cheers outside the courthouse, Fox News anchor Shannon Bream seemingly tried to soften the blow to MAGA viewers by pointing out that President Joe Biden’s son will soon be standing trial.
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“If they are, as we talked about, going to start referring to former President Trump as ‘convicted felon Donald Trump,’ and whether they are going to use that language that we also know Hunter Biden is facing two federal trials, which we can talk about, as well, one of them starting on Monday,” Bream noted.
Bream also noted that a conviction for the younger Biden could lead “many people across the spectrum” to feel that the political discourse had “turned into legal warfare,” prompting pro-Trump host Jeanine Pirro to double down on that comparison.
“We’ve been calling it lawfare, I think lawfare is far too soft, it’s far too benign,” Pirro exclaimed. “This is warfare!”
A longtime acolyte of Trump’s, Pirro continued to rage over the verdict, which she called a “gut punch” handed down by a “kangaroo court.” At the same time, she also asserted that Trump was the victim of a justice system akin to “Third-World countries” and that the deck was stacked against him.
“I want to believe that Americans believe in justice, and I think that in their gut, they realized that there is something that is very wrong here,” she groused. “We have gone over a cliff in America. This verdict is a verdict of someone who was forced to fight a 1,000-pound gorilla with both hands tied behind his back.”
Moments later, the former president walked out of the courthouse and, naturally, ranted that the “whole country” was rigged against him.
Pirro also took aim at the prosecution’s key witnesses in the trial, complaining that the testimony of a “hooker” and “serial perjurer” resulted in the conviction of the ex-president. Manhattan prosecutors accused Trump of fraudulently paying off adult film star Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about an alleged affair prior to the 2016 election, an arrangement that was handled by his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.
While Bream grumbled that the gag order against Trump during the trial had been “stretched to its limits,” Fox News host Trey Gowdy said that the ex-president could throw Trump’s conviction back into the face of Biden and Democrats.
“President Trump or his surrogates will say, perhaps I am a convicted felon, you are unconvicted felons! You have engaged in egregious conduct,” he proclaimed. “It just hasn’t resulted in us using the court system to go after you.”
He went on to warn that in this “new era of so-called progressive prosecutors” and “defense attorneys masquerading as prosecutors,” the Trump verdict could lead to “the undoing of our country.”
