Proclaiming Trump innocent and democracy guilty, Republicans show their authoritarian cards

The GOP reaction to the Trump hush money verdict is as big a story as the verdict itself. Democrats and the media owe the public a thorough accounting of both.

Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. October 29, 2016. Photo: Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons

This piece was originally published at The Hot Screen.

The felony conviction of Donald Trump on all 34 counts related to his hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels shows that the American justice system is capable of imposing meaningful sanctions on the lawless former president — if a criminal case actually manages to run its course. The verdict came despite a ceaseless barrage of propaganda from Trump and the Republican Party, including threats against the presiding judge, so that this outcome was hardly certain. Against significant odds, accountability has come for Trump, with the potential to unsettle what has been a neck-and-neck presidential race, and cause more Americans to grasp Trump’s fundamental unfitness for office. The former president’s felony status is disqualifying, and Democrats and others must invest time and effort into communicating why this is so (for a rundown of the arguments they can make, this recent piece by Brian Beutler is an excellent starting point). 

But just as important as the conviction itself is the contemptible and extreme Republican Party reaction that has exploded in its wake, as what most people view as the proper working of the justice system is being characterized by the Republican Party and Trump himself as a corrupt, rigged, and disastrous outcome that must be reversed at the earliest opportunity. More than this, though — the GOP is using the verdict to falsely proclaim that the entire justice system is corrupt, and as justification to plan radical measures to weaponize the justice system against their political opponents. In doing so, they show that they would rather burn down the entire edifice of the rule of law than see their party leader made subject to it.

We need to be clear-eyed about what these Republicans are saying, for they do not actually believe that the justice system is corrupt, and so to treat their claims in good faith is dangerous and self-defeating. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer observes, the problem that Trump and the GOP have with the verdict is that the system is in fact not corrupt, and has properly brought the former president to justice. But because their leader is a criminal, they must re-define the rule of the law itself to be the actual problem. This is upside-down, authoritarian logic, which basically reduces to saying that the law is whatever the Republican Party says it is. It’s a mentality that we have seen in countries like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but which has now migrated to American shores, and been adopted by one of America’s two major political parties.

On top of this, the GOP is now using the verdict as an excuse to seek retribution against their Democratic “enemies,” even though the Democrats did not actually do anything wrong in the first place; rather, the Democrats are being scapegoated because the legal system itself worked as intended! In other words, they intend to use the everyday, apolitical functioning of the justice system that held their criminal leader to account to justify the complete subversion of the justice system to achieve anti-democratic political ends, such as jailing opponents on false charges. Doubling down on a convicted Trump, the GOP has consciously made criminality and lawlessness central to the party’s political identity, a fact that if widely understood should rightly appall and alienate a vast swathe of the American citizenry.

This Republican reaction to Trump’s conviction — highly coordinated, relentless, and nihilistic — should provide final confirmation that the GOP has transformed into an authoritarian party that rejects democracy and all of its constituents, which include free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, equality under the law, and the illegitimacy of political violence. Indeed, we should also understand that the extreme GOP unity in supporting a criminal president is in itself reason for alarm. As MSNBC host Chris Hayes remarked, “The lesson they learned is if you enforce this totalitarian unanimity, you can keep chugging along. And it is a wildly dangerous lesson. Because they will do this no matter what he does, and no matter how bad it gets.” We might say that “totalitarian unanimity” (what a great, if ominous, phrase) is the GOP’s battering ram against democracy, their answer to the rule of law: stick together, say up is down, and seek power by tearing down America’s institutions while issuing a cloud of lies, propaganda, and violent threat. Another way of looking at is one that highlights the GOP’s increasingly fascistic tendencies, as we might say that the party is attempting to will itself into power through a unified embrace of lies and a mass subversion of the rule of law.

The GOP’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s conviction, with its accompanying assault on the rule of law, should be seen as on a continuum with Trump’s attempted coup following the 2020 election, the ever-broadening GOP refusal to accept adverse election results in 2024, and the GOP’s use of violent threat to achieve political ends (as Trump has done in threatening a “bloodbath” if he isn’t re-elected). Individually, each of these strategies can be called authoritarian and anti-democratic — but to properly understand, communicate, and confront their collective threat, we need to more precisely describe this GOP effort to overturn America’s democracy for what it is: an insurrection against the U.S. government.

In its denial of Trump’s conviction, the GOP is not simply aiming to overturn the verdict, but looking to overturn for all time the idea that any verdict can ever be considered settled if it goes against Republican Party interests (here, the calls to have the GOP-dominated Supreme Court somehow step in and make things right for Trump provides a blueprint for future tampering). If they can undo this, they can undo the prospect that any other Republican leader can be held to account for breaking the law. Such a principle, once established, would render the United States not a democracy but a one-party state, where the GOP could engage in any manner of political behavior — lawless or even violent — with impunity. 

If we view the Republican war on the Trump verdict as the latest campaign in an ongoing GOP insurrection, the Democrats’ failure to date to fully amplify the verdict is not just self-defeating, but a dereliction of duty. As I said, not only does the verdict disqualify Trump, the GOP’s reaction to it is an equally — or even more important — disqualifying development regarding the GOP as a whole. There is a fundamental error in thinking that this is just about Donald Trump, and that if the public simply hears about the verdict, it will form negative opinions about the former president and his capacity to return to the Oval Office. Such thinking ignores the fact that the GOP is actively trying to convince people not only that Trump isn’t guilty, but that American democracy is itself the problem! The GOP isn’t just engaging in aggressive politics — it’s engaging in an effort that, if successful, and in conjunction with the other insurrectionary efforts I noted above, would result in the transformation of the United States into an authoritarian, one-party state. For the Democrats to contest neither the Republican lies about the verdict, nor the accompanying effort to attack the rule of law, would be incomprehensible.

I do think that long-standing pathologies play a part in the Democrats’ reluctance to jump all over the verdict, a risk-averse approach to politics that has no faith in the Democrats’ ability to come out on top in partisan tussles (a point elaborated numerous times by political writer Beutler). But beyond this, I think that Democrats realize, consciously or not, that to paint Trump as a lawless felon who needs to drop out of the race would bring them into full and irreversible conflict with a radicalized GOP that refuses to back down on Trump’s purported innocence — a conflict that would in turn inexorably lead, through the force of logic, to full confrontation with the GOP’s other strategies of insurrection.

I wonder if another concept might help explain this underlying Democratic reluctance to fully engage against the GOP. The term “ontological shock” refers to the idea of one’s worldview being overwhelmed and undone by new, radical information that simply can’t be integrated into what one knows about how things work; a fun example is the earthquake that would be inflicted on people’s sense of reality if a UFO landed on the White House lawn. It may be that the Democratic Party leadership, including President Biden, is simply incapable of emotionally and intellectually processing the idea that the Republican Party has become authoritarian, bloody-minded, and relentless in its quest to overturn American democracy and our free society. Yet I think any fair-minded assessment of the GOP’s reaction to Trump’s conviction would have to conclude that the Republican Party has decisively, and irrevocably, broken with democracy and its most fundamental bulwark, the rule of law. If the GOP reaction to the verdict is the latest moment of ontological shock for the Democratic Party, then party leaders must quickly work through their trauma, grasp the new reality, and act to defend the United States against an obvious threat to the survival of the republic.

Perhaps my greatest frustration due to the Democrats’ inability to fully internalize and aggressively act against an insurrectionary GOP — after the obvious necessity of preserving American democracy — is that so much of the Republican Party’s quest for power depends on efforts to bluster and conjure alternate realities into being. Certainly this has been a key part of Trump’s power and appeal, in his case the promotion of the idea that he is subject neither to daily norms, nor to the sternest of laws. But now the effort is far more comprehensive, as the full firepower of the broader GOP has been brought to bear on presenting the party’s lawlessness as redemptive and justified — as being a truer expression of right than the law itself. For this strategy to work, though, the Republican Party must be able to overcome the Democrats’ ability to appeal to basic truth and reality — in this case, the idea that Trump’s trial wasn’t rigged, that Trump has been convicted through the judgment of 12 ordinary Americans, and that for many reasons his felonies disqualify him from the presidency.

It seems to me that the Democrats are being cowed by what is in part an epic bluff by the GOP, both in the case of the Trump conviction and with other insurrectionary strategies, such as the preemptive refusal to accept the 2024 election results. In fact, the Republican Party is far, far out on a brittle limb in terms of advancing ideas that are alien and bizarre to the American majority — for instance, the idea that the entire judiciary is part of a plot to “get” Donald Trump, or that Democrats only ever win elections through the illegal votes of millions of undocumented immigrants. To put it in more Trumpian terms, we could say that the GOP is advancing a high-stakes pyramid scheme, in which at each step the American public is being asked to provide the party with ever more outrageous deposits of credulity (this may be a major reason why Trump, with his business history of such schemes, has synched up so easily with the GOP’s fascistic forms of politics).

The fact that the GOP might yet succeed, in large part by convincing enough citizens of objectively insane and anti-American ideas, should clue Democrats into the fact that this insurrection is being fought in the realm of ideas and emotions, not through guns and bombs (even as Trump continues to intimate terrible violence to come should he lose in November). And though the movement challenging America is far wider than Trump, Democrats can leverage the former president to inflict devastating damage on the entire GOP and the anti-democratic movement it embodies. So many Republican politicians have mortgaged their reputations to the former president, hoping that his victory in November will be worth it. But by chaining himself to his criminality over the years, and particularly in the wake of this verdict, they have made themselves vulnerable to public opinion swinging decisively against a felon chief executive, with all the burning red flags that his criminal status raises.

The GOP’s reaction to the verdict — to basically declare that Trump, and by extension the GOP, is actually above the law — is equally damning and disqualifying, showing that the GOP would rather abandon democracy than abandon their criminal leader. Trump is the deranged avatar of a white supremacist, Christian nationalist movement to overturn and replace U.S. democracy with a system that serves an ever-shrinking, self-serving, and radicalized minority of the population. The Democrats need to drive home the true story of his soul sickness and resultant criminality, why this means a second Trump presidency would be a nightmare for the country, and how the GOP’s identification with his sordid values renders the Republican Party unworthy of holding power at any level.