Dissent in the ranks
It’s important to remember that as crazy as MAGA Republicans are now that the presidential election and the future of the Supreme Court does not hinge on the large numbers of voters chanting Don-ald Trump, Don-ald Trump like zombified extras in The Mummy. Trump is bleeding support he cannot afford to lose. The old, “death by a thousand cuts” routine worked against Hillary Clinton in 2016. It can work for Democrats and Joe Biden in 2024.
Greg Sargent points to an item lost in Politico’s Playbook coverage of Trump’s effort to defund Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Trump prosecutions:
“I don’t think it’s a good idea unless you can show that [the prosecutors] acted in bad faith or fraud or something like that,” Rep. Mike Simpson, a senior appropriator, told Playbook, speaking about the defund-Smith push. He denounced the idea as “stupid,” adding of prosecutors: “They’re just doing their job—even though I disagree with what they did.”
Wait, what? Trump’s prosecutorial tormentors are not acting in bad faith or being fraudulent? Do tell!
Simpson apparently thought he was just rebuffing a tough question, but he also badly undermined a core argument of Trump and his propagandists: that the prosecutions of Trump are wholly illegitimate, exposing the “deep state” as irredeemably corrupt to its very core. Now comes along a top Republican who disagrees with the prosecutions of Trump on their interpretation of the law, but appears to allow that the special counsel’s office is not abusing its institutional role in a way that merits maximal GOP tactics in response, such as defunding it.
This undercuts Republicans’ contention that investigations into Trump are just “deep state” corruption. If they are, what are the investigations Republicans have planned for Democrats under a second Trump administration?
Democrats recognize the importance of this moment. “Mike Simpson just destroyed MAGA-world’s argument that Trump’s prosecution on federal charges is fraudulent or in bad faith,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland emailed me. “Like the New York prosecution, it is a bona fide and good-faith criminal prosecution, and the attempt to defund it, like the effort to delegitimize it, is fundamentally stupid.”
“Other Republicans should follow Simpson and stop demonizing the justice system and the rule of law,” Raskin continued, effectively demonstrating how Trump’s criming can be used as a wedge going forward.
Democrats are posting billboards this weekend in Michigan near The People’s Convention, “a kind of off-brand RNC hosted by Turning Point Action.” They’ll brand Trump and his enablers “crooks” just “out for themselves.”
(A social worker who works with former convicts balks at using the phrase “convicted felon” against Trump, similar to immigration activists preferring “undocumented,” a state in which people find themselves, to “illegals,” an identity. But “crooks” may not be as fraught. )
Trump’s convictions put Republicans in a tough position, at least for those not zombified enough to abandon the rule of law for their god-king. Trump is demanding House Republicans find a way (somehow) to reverse his New York state convictions.
What’s telling is that vulnerable House Republicans are balking—privately. As Politico reports, due in part to “skittish swing-district members,” the Speaker is “already finding it difficult to deliver for Trump.”
Indeed, in another sign that Trump’s criminality is becoming a wedge, some Republicans representing swing districts are decidedly uninterested in commenting on Trump’s felony convictions.
Taint, Trump taint, is something even some Republicans now don’t want to get on them. Because “majorities of voters agree with Trump’s convictions and believe he committed serious federal crimes.”
Biden ads reminding voters what Trump instigated on Jan. 6 will place them in the same uncomfortable position. “God or country” won’t work on evangelicals who equate the two. But they may challenge others to choose between the law or Trump.
Are they the law-respecting Americans they tell themselves they are?
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