Donald Trump’s response to his guilty verdict was mind-numbingly predictable. During a Friday morning press conference, Trump advanced yet another canard, saying, “If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone.”
It was merely the latest example of his attempt to cast himself as a victim, pretend he’s your savior, and undermine confidence in our criminal justice system. Of course, he brought all of this on himself.
This is his modus operandi: Trump commits egregious, unprecedented acts, and then he dares you to do something about it. Your choice is to either a) let him get away with it (thereby incentivizing future aggressions), or b) try to hold him accountable (which he will then cast as an act of aggression).
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To put it bluntly, Trump takes hostages. Rather than putting the country ahead of his own ego, Trump says, “You can shoot me, but I’ll make sure to also take down everything (the country, democracy, the criminal justice system, American institutions, etc.) with me.”
And then, amid the rubble wrought by chaos and division, Trump and his minions shout, “Look at what you made us do!”
Yes, the game is rigged, but it’s rigged toward Trump. It’s heads Trump wins, and tails the rest of us lose. Those of us who care about preserving liberal democracy are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. You can let Trump run lawlessly (and suffer the inevitable consequences), or you can try to hold him accountable (and also suffer the consequences).
We are just beginning to see some of the consequences for 12 jurors finding him guilty. We aren’t quite at civil war levels, yet, but it’s fair to say that our country is even more divided today than we were yesterday.
For this, I blame Trump, not the rest of us who are merely trying to hold him accountable. Regardless, we are talking about a significant number of Americans who (thanks to Trump) now believe this country is a banana republic.
To be sure, Trump has always had a cadre of loyal fanatics who (as he has boasted) would stick with him if he shot someone on 5th Ave. But how did otherwise normal Republicans get press-ganged into his cult?
It didn’t happen overnight. You could write a book about how the country got here, but a quick refresher is in order.
Once Trump became the Republican nominee, he was viewed by many as the lesser of two evils. Which is to say that many normie Republicans held their nose and voted for him.
But here’s the problem: Cognitive dissonance makes it difficult to rationalize voting for someone you also find morally repugnant. And since most Republicans couldn’t bring themselves not to vote for the GOP nominee, the only option was to subconsciously lower their moral standards.
Fast-forward to Trump’s guilty verdict, and you see the next stage of this psychological phenomenon.
Because it’s inconceivable to concede that your party’s presidential nominee is a bona fide felon (and because it’s inconceivable to condone Trump paying hush money to a porn star), it’s easier to believe the trial was “rigged.”
Once someone has gone through this psychological cycle, the only logical reactions to Trump’s conviction are outrage and radicalization.
I still believe that, on the margins, this conviction has a net-positive electoral impact for Joe Biden. At the same time, this decision is already galvanizing Republicans, including folks normally viewed as fairly mainstream Republicans.
Here, I’m thinking of pols like Sen. Marco Rubio, as well as center-right commentators like Guy Benson (who tweeted a picture of an upside-down flag) and Republican strategist Scott Jennings (who became embroiled in a fight with Never Trumper George Conway on CNN on Thursday morning, after asserting there was no underlying crime and that Alvin Bragg was a “partisan prosecutor”).
Because these are “professional Republicans,” it’s impossible to disentangle the performative demands of their jobs from their sincere, personal beliefs (which may or may not have been the product of the cognitive dissonance described previously).
Regardless, we now have two Americas—one that views Trump as a convicted criminal, and the other that views him as both savior and martyr.
Along those lines, one of the viral memes to pop up in the wake of this verdict was a picture of Jesus comforting Donald Trump, with the words, “It’s okay, they called me guilty, too.” Talk about blasphemy.
While we can certainly think of other historical figures who might be more appropriately compared to Trump, JC did say, “…I have come to divide people against each other!”
That’s probably the only thing Trump has in common with Jesus—but at least it’s something.
