“Guilty.” Donald Trump had avoided the word for so long that it was understandable to think he might never face it. When he was finally hit with a criminal conviction, soon after 5 P.M. on a sunny late-May afternoon, he had to sit and listen inside a New York courtroom as the label he so dreaded was directed at him again and again—thirty-four guilties, one for each of the thirty-four felony counts against him. Too bad the television cameras weren’t able to record this historic moment. We the people will be left to imagine what it looked like when the only former American President to go on trial became the only ex-President to bear the title of “convicted felon.”
Trump himself seemed a bit stunned—deflated, even. Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom, he offered a lacklustre rant, a sort of mashup of his greatest hits: “This was a rigged, disgraceful trial”; “I’m a very innocent man.” Soon, he was complaining about “millions and millions of people pouring into our country right now, from prisons and from mental institutions.” Was his standard-issue inflammatory anti-immigration diatribe related to his falsifying of business records in a 2016 hush-money payoff to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels? Trump didn’t care. “We have a country that’s in big trouble,” he said, before returning to the matter at hand. “This is long from over.” Then he turned his back and left.
What Trump lacked in truly incandescent rage, however, was soon supplied, in excess, by his followers—a backlash that unfolded as a carefully choreographed and truly unprecedented assault on the legitimacy of the American legal system. It struck me as no less threatening for having obviously been planned largely in advance. “Kangaroo court. Banana republic,” one social-media post from the Trump White House veteran Nick Ayers read—a pithy summation of much of the MAGA response. Senator Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, called the verdict “the most egregious miscarriage of justice in our nation’s history,” proving both that he does not know our nation’s history and that hyperbole in defense of their leader is considered the most forgivable of G.O.P. sins.
Rewriting history—and, at times, even outright inverting it—is one of the signatures of Trumpism, as it is of so many authoritarian political movements. In Washington on Thursday morning, hours before the verdict, Senator Marco Rubio posted on social media an old newsreel video of revolutionary justice being meted out in front of thousands of spectators at a sports palace in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. “The public spectacle of political show trials has come to America,” he wrote. A day earlier, in another social-media post, he had compared Trump’s hush-money case to “the kind of sham trial used against political opponents of the regime in the old Soviet Union.”
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, surely knows better: Trump will not be summarily executed, as so many hundreds of thousands were in the Soviet purges. He won’t even have to wear an orange uniform if he does, in fact, end up serving time—inmates in New York are actually banned from doing so. After the verdict came out, on Thursday evening, Rubio complained again about “a political show trial.” Like Trump himself and many of his followers, and with no apologies to Woody Allen, he blamed Joe Biden for the whole travesty of a mockery of a sham.
Few Republicans dared to dissent from this instant new orthodoxy. Their lockstep statements made one long for the old bipartisan clichés about the sanctity of the courts and the wisdom of a jury made up of one’s peers. Indeed, when one prominent Republican, the former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, who is now running for Senate, ventured to offer the formerly standard comforting mush about respecting the verdict and reaffirming the rule of law that “made this nation great,” the reaction from other Republicans was swift and stunning. “I don’t respect this verdict,” the Utah senator Mike Lee posted, in response to Hogan’s tweet. “Nor should anyone.” Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s top campaign advisers, was so offended by Hogan’s defense of the American justice system that he appeared to publicly threaten his Senate bid. “You just ended your campaign,” LaCivita wrote to Hogan on X.
The blunt language set off all my post-2020 alarm bells—the Party that calls on its followers not to respect the courts is one that has already shown it can next order them to the streets. If this is how they are talking now, what will they do if the presiding judge in the trial, Juan Merchan, orders Trump imprisoned—a sentencing that is currently set to take place on July 11th, just four days before the opening of the Republican National Convention? Is it fanciful, alarmist, or shrill to envision angry Trumpists storming the Manhattan courthouse? No, of course not. They have already shown what they’re capable of.
I found one of the statements reacting to the verdict especially chilling. It came from House Speaker Mike Johnson. There was nothing particularly notable about what Johnson said—he used the same buzzwords about “the weaponization of our justice system” and the “absurd verdict” as so many of his Republican colleagues. The difference was that Johnson, unlike many of the empty suits who bluster around Washington, has already taken actions to rewrite history to suit Trump’s version of events—a project that will be crucial in determining whether Trump can overcome the stigma of a criminal conviction to win back the Presidency in November.
Just last week, in fact, Johnson’s House Republican majority went so far as to literally decree the fact of Trump’s trial off-limits. The episode, which did not get much attention at the time, is worth recounting in a bit of detail, because it hardly seems believable. And because it may be a preview of things to come.
The fight began a week ago Wednesday, when Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts representative who, for years, has been the decidedly unflashy top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, began debate on a procedural motion by criticizing the do-nothing 118th Congress, which is on track to be the least productive in recent memory. The session has been, McGovern concluded, “a stunning indictment of their ability to get anything done.” The matter would have ended there had McGovern not had a few more things to say on the matter of indictments—and, more specifically, Trump’s four pending ones. Perhaps, McGovern theorized, House Republicans were offering lame measures to debate on the floor “to distract from the fact that their candidate for President has been indicted more times than he’s been elected,” or that “the leader of their party is on trial for covering up hush-money payments to a porn star for political gain.”
This language earned him an admonition from the Republican congressman presiding, who told McGovern to “refrain from engaging in personalities towards presumed nominees for the office of the president.” Incredulous, McGovern pointed out the hypocrisy of reprimanding him for stating the simple fact of the charges against Trump, while Republicans regularly take to the House floor to inveigh against the “sham” legal proceedings. Eventually, he picked up a well-thumbed copy of Jefferson’s “Manual,” the original parliamentary bible for the U.S. Congress, drawn from centuries of British tradition. He noted its prohibition on speaking “irreverently or seditiously against the King,” and added, “Is that what this is about?”
When McGovern then had the temerity to enumerate all Trump’s various criminal cases, a Republican congresswoman from Indiana jumped in, demanding that McGovern’s words be “taken down”—that is, struck from the official record. And sure enough, when the ruling came back, the archaic prohibition on trashing the kings of yore was indeed cited, and McGovern’s words were officially deleted on the grounds that he had accused Trump of “illegal activities”—as if McGovern were somehow just slinging charges on his own rather than referring to actual cases in courts of law. Trump is no sovereign, regal or otherwise—not yet, anyway. But, in the House overseen by his party, unpleasant events concerning him can officially be written out of history with the bang of a gavel.
Now that Trump has become the first former President in American history to be convicted of a crime, will the MAGA Congress ban that information, too? What happens when McGovern, or one of his Democratic colleagues, goes to the floor to read out Thursday’s stunning news, all thirty-four counts of it? The jury’s word may have been “guilty,” but it is far from the last one we’ll hear. ♦
