After his felony convictions, Donald Trump is enthusiastically running for president as a criminal
While still barely pretending to be innocent, Trump is celebrating being a thug
Hypocrisy is commonplace in politics, but watching the about-face from Republicans over one of their own being held accountable for his actions has still been breathtaking. Ordinarily, the self-described party of law and order loves using the legal system as a cudgel against queer people, women, and government safety regulations, but now that Donald Trump is finally starting to face justice, they are absolutely losing it.
As news of the guilty verdict in Trump’s hush money trial pinged back and forth across the country like a pinball Thursday, I was waiting for my call time at an evening performance in Las Vegas where I’d be telling jokes to a colorful sampling of the country. Within what must’ve been seconds of the public announcement, my phone lit up with a dozen text messages and emails, all from friends celebrating the multi-felony conviction of lifetime crook, Donald Jabroni Trump.
Things were a lot different when I turned on Fox News to see Jesse Watters reporting the jury’s finding with the same solemnity the network’s anchors use when covering sober subjects such as “Santa is white, actually” and “Woke culture has extinguished my desire to fuck the green M&M.” He claimed that the trial “dehumanized” Trump and that flatulent former commander in chief was being treated “like a caged animal.” I’ve yet to see an orangutan at the zoo shit into a gold toilet, but then I haven't been in quite a while.
Elsewhere at Fox, an uncharacteristically calm Judge Jeanine Pirro called foul on the basis that the jury “convicted a former president on a crime that people don’t even know what it means.” While I’d guess the majority of the public writ large has lost the thread of what the actual crime is in this case, with many people believing erroneously that the crime was the payoff itself, the jury sat through 22 days of testimony and legalese with ample time to ask questions for clarity before deliberations began. Whether any random person on the street can grasp the concept of the crimes committed is irrelevant. One thing that is easy for even the dumbest amongst us to understand is that Trump is a career criminal who can’t make it to lunch without spouting off a tremendous amount of lies. The best you’ve ever heard, in fact.
Over at CNN, a serious Anderson Cooper broke down the details of the case alongside Watergate celebrities Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward, whom you should never forgive for withholding damning information on Trump in order to sell books, described the trial as “a chapter in the political wars.” “It’s not about the law,” he said, before continuing on to clarify that Trump’s three other upcoming trials are far more consequential.
Considering Trump did, in fact, break the law in while covering up his sexual escapades, I can’t fully agree that this trial was purely political, but it still is not as satisfying. From the outside, it’s reminiscent of Al Capone being sent to jail for tax evasion or O.J. Simpson getting locked up for armed robbery. You’re glad to see it, but the asshole in question deserves a lot worse.
For anyone who’s checked out of this trial to save your energy for the next three, Trump racked up 34 felony counts due to a two-fold crime. The primary offense is that he falsified payment records to his former attorney, Michael Cohen. The secondary crime, the one that seems to be the reason behind the nearly three dozen felony counts, is that Trump falsified those documents as part of a scheme to evade campaign finance laws. The argument from the prosecution was that by withholding the information about his payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, Trump kept something from Americans that might have changed their votes.
I find that last part a little bit absurd, to be perfectly honest, since Trump’s supporters look for any possible excuse to vote for him. They'll excuse any transgression—not paying construction workers, insulting wounded veterans, and even publicly lusting after his own daughter.
It's delusional for Trump's critics to think that his adoring fans will see him for what he is, a racist, sexist conman who wouldn’t think of helping another human being unless it added to the balance of his ever-dwindling bank account. We’re quick to call the MAGA clan a cult, while seemingly forgetting how cults operate—with blind devotion to their leader. Lest we forget, Jim Jones wiped out nearly a thousand people in 1978 by giving a simple order. Parents killed their own children on that tragic day, and the People's Temple didn’t even sell merch.
Whenever Trump’s legal team inevitably appeals this decision, they’ll be better off leaning into his myriad crimes. What jury could possibly decide to convict a man for “duping” voters by covering up a hush money payment when those same voters had plenty of access to the Access Hollywood tape, E. Jean Carroll’s account of being sexually assaulted by Trump, Ivana Trump’s account of him raping her, and my favorite, his tweet from 2013 that reads “26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?” The man is an unabashed rape apologist and serial sex pest himself.
I don’t feel duped by the hush money payment cover-up. I feel duped by his cover-up of the seriousness of Covid, leading to countless lives lost — more than we’ll ever know as his loyalists remain unvaccinated and continue to spread the deadly disease. I feel duped by his massive tax cuts for the wealthiest among us while people across the country lost their jobs, homes, and businesses during the pandemic. I feel duped by him overcharging the Secret Service to stay at Trump hotels, to the tune of $1.4 million by October 2022. I feel duped by him appointing three ultra-conservative justices on the Supreme Court, all of whom swore that Roe v. Wade was settled law, before aggressively rolling back women’s reproductive rights in a number of cases, and then overturning Roe entirely.
The self-proclaimed party of law and order hasn’t seriously cared about either in my lifetime and continues to be more open in their disregard for rules every single day. Already, Trump is campaigning on his criminal mug shot and featuring accused murders at rallies. I think we’d all be better off if Republicans dropped “law and order” in favor of something more upfront, like “the party of doing whatever the fuck we want.” With a slogan like that, even I’d be tempted to join.