Trump’s abettors flock to show fealty
Plus, a nightmare scenario of how an autocrat could wreck the economy
This week, a parade of Republican electeds, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, made a pilgrimage to New York to make a shocking claim: they don’t believe the New York court, or any court, can credibly convict Donald Trump.
Speaker Johnson, along with U.S. Senators Rick Scott and J.D. Vance, Representatives Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, and others, stepped up to microphones and attacked the trial as a “sham” and “election interference.” Some of them even seemed to style themselves in Trump’s image, dressing in Trump’s preferred uniform of a navy suit and red tie.
This may seem clownish, but remember: these officials wield real power in our system, which Trump has made very explicit he expects to be wielded in his favor to advance his authoritarian aims.
I asked my colleague Amanda Carpenter for her take on the situation:
What’s most striking, to me, is that most of these Trump defenders aren’t really defending him on the merits. They’re not saying he’s innocent or claiming that what’s alleged to have happened didn’t happen.
They hold the idea that Trump — whether it’s because he is running for president, was president, or will be president again — should not be investigated, tried or convicted for anything, ever. That idea isn’t a matter of simple party loyalty; it stands in opposition to our nation’s founding principle that no person is above the law.
This is a dramatic development. It wasn’t like this in the past two elections.
In the 2016 and 2020 elections, the Republican Party acted to shield Trump from any political accountability; in the aftermath of January 6, they refused to impeach or convict him. Now that Trump stands as the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, they are assembling to shield him from any criminal accountability as well. This is a show of force, likely to be replicated in various other political and legal forums as the November election approaches. That’s what makes the 2024 election, and the possibility of Trump’s second term, so dangerously different.
(Read Amanda’s prescient piece on the threat of attacks on the courts from before the trial began here.)
Implicit threats risk encouraging real violence
Worth noting, the damage they’re doing isn’t just symbolic. This has real, human consequences. Per Kristy Parker:
Trump is asking, in effect, for the elected leaders of the GOP to use their positions of power and visibility to disparage and delegitimize the criminal justice system. With their baseless claims of an unfair process, they are implicitly threatening the judges, prosecutors, and juries who are tasked by our system with evaluating potential crimes equally and without regard to political status. And they are doing so knowing that public attacks like this can pose real-life consequences in the form of harassment, intimidation, or worse.
Threats like these can quickly escalate to violence, as Peter Eisler, Ned Parker, and Joseph Tanfani document in the latest special report for Reuters, “Trump blasts his trial judges. Then his fans call for violence”:
Experts on extremism say the constant repetition of threatening or menacing language can normalize the idea of violence — and increase the risk of someone carrying it out. Mitch Silber, a former New York City Police Department director of intelligence analysis, compared the Trump supporters now calling for violence against judges to the U.S. Capitol rioters who believed they were following Trump’s “marching orders” on Jan. 6, 2021.
“This is just the 2023-2024 iteration of that phenomenon,” Silber said. “Articulating these ideas is the first step along the pathway of mobilizing to violence.”
As if to make the threatening subtext more overt, Rep. Matt Gaetz tweeted a callback to Trump’s notorious instruction to the Proud Boys: “Standing back and standing by, Mr. President.”
But coerced support is not the same as strength
Amanda is spot-on; this is intended as a show of force. But it also shows a whiff of desperation.
Think about it for a second. Who showed up this week?
Speaker Mike Johnson just survived a motion to vacate in part because Trump said “this is not the time” for Republicans to oust him.
Doug Burgum, J.D. Vance, and Byron Donalds are all hoping to be Trump’s running mate.
David McIntosh, the head of the Club for Growth, is trying to re-earn Trump’s favor after opposing him in 2023.
A bunch of the most extreme members of the House — Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and so on — were willing to risk their party losing control of the floor to show loyalty to Trump.
Vivek Ramaswamy is a fading figure trying to hold onto the spotlight.
All of them are seeking Trump's favor in hopes of improving their personal political prospects, not the party’s.
And who wasn’t there? Any Republican politician with political or electoral support outside of Trump. All those other GOP governors and senators — not to mention former luminaries like former Speaker & VP candidate Paul Ryan, who said this week he would not vote for Trump — have stayed far away from lower Manhattan, where their party’s leader is standing trial for multiple felonies.
As former president, and current presumptive nominee, Trump is the de facto leader of the Republican Party. But by all indicators, it's a strained relationship. Many of the party’s old-guard leaders — the Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney-types — probably disagree, on some level, with his attacks on the judges, courts, and the rule of law.
But it’s a collective action problem. Unless the pro-democracy coalition of Republicans, Independents, and Democrats band together and push back, we’re going to see a lot more people lining up to play henchmen for an authoritarian.
How an autocrat could wreck the economy
You think the inflation of the last few years, which peaked at 8 percent in the U.S., was bad? Try 70 percent, as in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. Or what about 2,000,000 percent, as in Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela? (You read that right — two million percent.)
In both those cases (and in many others around the world) inflation was the consequence of a strongman leader getting his hands on the central bank and its control over monetary policy.
Which is exactly what Donald Trump seems to be aiming for in the United States. Ori Lev breaks it down:
Former Trump administration officials and other allies have reportedly produced a 10-page document outlining ways that the central bank’s independence could be co-opted in service of the president’s political agenda, including the possibility of firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell from his chairmanship.
Ori goes on to explain how this should be a red-alert moment for the business community:
The upshot? Trump has proven that he is not constrained by the norms that have guided and constrained other presidents. Particularly in light of the potentially weakened legal protections afforded to Federal Reserve governors against removal from office following recent Supreme Court rulings, Trump’s persistent attacks on Powell in his first term, and Trump’s reported intentions to bring other independent agencies under presidential control, there is every reason to believe that the plans being hatched by his allies may well be carried out in a second Trump administration. Business leaders who rely on stable economic conditions and monetary policy geared to long-term economic growth should take note.
While some of Trump’s policy positions may appear to be pro-business, Trump’s plans for governance are decidedly not. History has shown that similar accretions of executive power exercised at the whims of a leader tend to undermine both long-term economic performance and the rule of law that undergirds free and competitive markets.
Neither outcome is ultimately business friendly.
Read Ori’s whole piece here.
A growing conservative pro-democracy movement
If you’re not following the Society for the Rule of Law, you should be. It’s a new group of conservative and center-right lawyers and jurists standing up for the Constitution. Some notable names involved.
They have three forthcoming events worth checking out:
A virtual webinar next Tuesday, May 21st, on the pardon power (feat. Protect Democracy’s Justin Florence). More on the limits to pardon power here.
An in-person event with Robert Kagan in DC on June 4th.
A summer law student gathering in DC on June 20th.
What else we’re tracking:
A “stop the steal” symbol was displayed outside Samuel Alito’s house three days before Biden was inaugurated. I have no words.
Per WaPo, Paul Manafort is poised to re-join Trumpworld, with his 2020 pardon seemingly emboldening his conduct. (Background on the dangers of “henchmen pardons” here.)
The New Republic has a chilling series on “what American fascism would look like.” Especially recommend Brian Stelter’s piece on what could happen to the free press and Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s piece on the parallels between Project 2025 and other strongmen through history.
Similarly, Rachel Kleinfeld explains the risk of “coming attacks on nonprofits” in The Fulcrum.
…But there are things we can do. The Carnegie Endowment’s Saskia Brechenmacher writes on the lessons learned from defending civic space around the world. Every nonprofit leader should follow these seven recommendations.
In recent weeks, Trump has ranted against campus protestors, saying he will “immediately deport” them if elected. Charles M. Blow explains how antithetical that is to the Constitution.
The Senate Rules Committee advanced three bipartisan bills on elections and AI. They’re important.
A fascinating study asked participants to deactivate their Facebook and Instagram accounts before the 2020 election. While there were some impacts — especially lower political engagement — “the effects of both Facebook and Instagram deactivation on affective and issue polarization, perceived legitimacy of the election, candidate favorability, and voter turnout were all precisely estimated and close to zero.”