Actually it was Maya Angelou who said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,”, which I looked up after typing the title above.
Today’s post is another summary of political items, in this case about Republican responses to Trump’s conviction on fraud charges in New York City a few days ago. Keep in mind that much of this is projecting. This is what they would do to Democrats, if they could, and some of them even say so.
Items at aggregate site Joe.My.God yesterday and today.
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- (from Politico) Eight GOP Senators Say They’ll Block Major Legislation And Biden’s Nominees Over Trump Being Found Guilty (Because loyalty to the leader overrides democratic principles of governance. This intransigence is why the latest Congress got nothing done).
- (Tucker Carlson‘s show) Carlson: Verdict Shows Democrats Would Execute Me. (It says nothing of the sort. Carlson is a paranoid moron.)
- (Tim Pool‘s podcast, I think) Laura Loomer Calls For Executing Democrats [VIDEO]. “Then these people can spend three years of their lives fighting tooth and nail against the government for crimes they committed and we can prove.” (They’ve had years and years, and with so many Trump-appointed judges, what’s taking them so long? This is like Trump’s promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare, which he somehow never got around to in the four years he was president. And it’s because they don’t actually have a case. They just lie to their base and claim that they do, because the base believes.)
- (Fox News) Ingraham: Dems Want To Provoke Verdict Violence. (Hellooo??)
- (The Megan Kelly Show, on SiriusXM) Megyn Kelly Calls For “Reviving Laws On Dead Crimes” To Prosecute Obama, Hillary Clinton, And The Bidens (“Democrats will rue the day they decided to use lawfare to stop a presidential candidate. I’m not talking about violence, I’m talking about tit-for-tat. You just wait.”)
- (Daily Wire) Walsh: Trump Must Publish List Of Ten Top Democrats Who He Will Have Arrested Upon Taking Office [VIDEO] (Where are all those-Trump appointed judges? What are you waiting for, if there’s evidence of crimes?)
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More:
AlterNet, Carl Gibson, 1 Jun 2024: ‘May God strike them dead’: Trump supporters vow to dox jurors and make them ‘miserable’
Not a party of law and order; a cult, driven by defiance of norms, and revenge. A cult.
And
Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 31 May 2024: MAGA Martyrdom Machine Portrays Felon Trump as Victim, Vows Revenge
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Media Matters, 31 May 2024: MAGA media rage in response to Trump’s 34 guilty verdicts
Fox News stars and other MAGA media commentators have responded to former President Donald Trump’s historic criminal conviction in a New York court with apocalyptic rhetoric and demands for retribution.
Followed by a long list of citations, similar to my list above, from sources including Fox News, War Room, Triggered, The Sean Hannity Show, and Newsmax.
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Other mainstream responses.
Slate, Nitish Pahwa, 30 May 2024: How MAGA World Closed Ranks Around Felon Trump, subtitled “You know who is doing the real crimes in this country, don’t you?”
*Everyone* is a criminal and is corrupt, except of course for Donald Trump. Another example of the Trump cult.
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Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 30 May 2024: Why the ludicrous Republican response to Trump’s conviction matters, subtitled “Republicans are busy attacking the legitimacy of the American legal and political system. We’ve seen where that leads.”
Everything is a conspiracy against them, say the Republicans. Says Mike Johnson. The writer responds. With nuances likely imperceptible to Republicans.
But Democrats didn’t convict Trump; a jury of 12 ordinary Americans did. The Biden administration played no role in prosecuting the case; the indictment came from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and was issued after federal prosecutors declined to go after Trump on similar charges.
Johnson knows all that, but it doesn’t matter. His goal is to support Trump’s narrative that the entire American political and legal system is controlled by Biden and Democrats: a banana republic, not a democracy worthy of its name. A range of leading Republicans — from House Majority Steve Scalise to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to rising Senate stars Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance — have all said basically the same thing.
At this point, you might be wondering: Is any of this surprising? Trump always claims he’s the victim of a conspiracy, and Republicans always end up backing whatever Trump says.
But that’s precisely the problem. The current Republican party is so hostile to the foundations of the American political system that they can be counted on to attack the possibility of a fair Trump trial. Either Trump should be able to do whatever he wants with no accountability, or it’s proof that the entire edifice of American law and politics is rotten.
Republican either don’t know these facts, and are thus dimwitted, or are lying about them. Which alternative is more consistent with a cult? The article goes on about the insurrectionary ideology.
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NY Times, Santul Nerkar, 31 May 2024 (published in today’s paper, 1 Jun 2024): How Partisan Media Outlets Covered Trump’s Guilty Verdict
With examples on the right from The Daily Wire and The National Review; on the left from The New Republic and The Nation. Their responses are predictable. I think I’ll add these items to my chart.
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Again, these are expressions of base, tribal, human nature. The experiments over the past two or three hundred years of the Enlightenment, and democracy, seem to be fading.
