Trump’s defenders slink to the occasion
Donald Trump will be arraigned in a Washington, D.C. court this afternoon on charges spelled out in the indictment a federal grand jury handed down on Tuesday. He and his defenders will googolplex down on lies and distortions about those charges. First up from his defense team is that Trump is being prosecuted for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. That is not a legal defense, but a political one for consumption and repetition by his supporters. They will do both.
The former president’s alleged crimes are spelled out on the cover page of the grand jury’s indictment: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD J. TRUMP, Defendant. And in paragraph four (pg. 2). And at the top of page 3 (COUNT ONE). And at the top of pages 43, 44 and 45 (COUNTS TWO, THREE and FOUR). Chapter and verse.
Conspiracy to defraud the United States; two counts of conspiracy to obstruct and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding; and a conspiracy against “the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured … by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” That is, Trump is charged with a sweeping conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election.
Trump is not charged with lying, although lie he did, repeatedly, knowingly, purposefully in furtherance of the alleged conspiracies.
Now let the gaslighting begin … um, continue. Trump teed up the stolen election lie long before November 3, 2020.
What special counsel Jack Smith spells out in the indictment is how Trump, never “known for fealty to truth,” as Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman put it, spewed lies for months following the 2020 election he lost.
The Lie is Trump’s hammer, the favorite tool in his toolbox. “Truthful hyperbole” is his euphemism (itself a lie). “My leverage came from confirming an impression [my marks] were already predisposed to believe,” Trump explains in “The Art of the Deal.” In this case, he and his followers wished to believe The Lie that he actually had won.
But he’d been robbed. He repeated that lie widely in the months following the election, the indictment states. “If you repeat something enough, he has told confidants over time, people will believe it,” write Schmidt and Haberman. Trump needed his followers to believe it so he could use them in a last-ditch effort to retain power. He and his co-conspirators would use the lies to coerce Republican electors in states he lost into submitting fraudulent elector documents to the government. They hoped thereby to gin up “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification of Biden as president-elect” (para. 54).
“The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won. He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures,” the Smith indictment states.
Trump is not charged with lying. He is charged with not stopping at lying.
Trump defenders’ lies about his lies are just getting warmed up.
Defense attorney John Lauro called the indictment “an attack on free speech and political advocacy” in an interview with CNN. The indictment, he said, is “an effort to not only criminalize, but also to censor free speech” from Trump.
The New York Times offers more:
“So the First Amendment protects President Trump in this way: After 2020, he saw all these irregularities, he got affidavits from around the country, sworn testimony, he saw the rules being changed in the middle of the election process — as a president, he’s entitled to speak on those issues,” Mr. Trump’s defense lawyer in the case, John Lauro, said on Wednesday in an interview on CBS.
“What the government would have to prove in this case, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that speech is not protected by the First Amendment, and they’ll never be able to do that,” he said.
Lauro claims Trump was only “relying on the advice of an attorney, John Eastman.” Eastman, one of the principal architects of the “fake” electoral votes scheme (para. 59), is the designated scapegoat.
Like Trump himself, his defense team is counting on his cult members not reading the actual indictment, and on the few who do not believing a word of it. They hope now to, as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon recommended, “flood the zone with shit” and somehow derail Trump’s prosecution and conviction. Meantime, Trump will attempt to win reelection to the Oval Office next year in a second last-ditch effort. To evade punishment for convictions and federal prosecution in outstanding cases, he’ll pardon himself for the former and quash the latter.
Pushing back on his defense’s narratives with facts won’t be effective. Establishing a simple, repeatable counter-message might.
“The meta-theme of Smith’s indictment might be described as ‘Trump lied; democracy nearly died,’ ” writes Ed Kilgore.
The meta-theme of Trump’s reelection campaign might be described as “Vote for me and I’ll pardon me.”