Jury Finds Trump Guilty on 34 Counts, His Supporters Rally

Our legal system should work without prejudice or favor, and yesterday demonstrated that sometimes that ideal is achieved. In the early evening of May 30, 2024, Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges of causing or creating fraudulent business records by a New York City jury.

• [CNN] Trump found guilty in hush money trial
• [AP] Guilty: Trump becomes first former US president convicted of felony crimes
• [New York Times] Trump Guilty on All Counts in Hush-Money Case

There’s no point in recounting the last six weeks of on this blog. There are plenty of online spaces providing excellent overviews of the legal case. Instead, I need to vent a bit (again) about the loss of the Republican Party to Donald Trump.

The party leaders and voters rallying to defend Donald Trump are nothing more than a horrifying echo of the late nineteenth-century Southern Democrats. Trump embodies white Evangelical grievances. Anything he does or says must be forgiven because he is the mighty defender of “proud traditions.”

Trump, the ultimate New York insider, has become the simulacrum for Southern Pride. Statues of Trump would be erected next to those of Robert E. Lee if his followers had their wishes granted.

Trump vs. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was viewed by Trump supporters through a racial, regional, and religious prism. How dare that elite Yankee Alvin Bragg believe he could hold Donald Trump accountable for anything? Doesn’t Bragg know his place?

I have been following a mix of media covering the Trump Trials (or lack of trials). Yes, I even endured a bit of Fox News along the way.

And none of the media I consume features a strong, consistent Republican voice speaking in defense of our legal system. No national Republican has stated that our jury system works better than the alternatives. No national Republican has dared to suggest juries can hear cases against Donald Trump and render fair judgments.

Instead, it is “former Republicans” and “former Libertarians” speaking out to defend the 12 men and women of New York who delivered a verdict against Trump.

Tangent: Understanding Former Republicans

Why are there so many former Republicans and Libertarians? Some of us used to believe that all parties are flawed, but there was hope the GOP and LP could be modernized and reformed. Surely those of us advocating for “live and let live” policies would prevail. After all, wasn’t it Ronald Reagan who said that government was the problem?

No, today’s Republicans and Libertarians have no qualms about using government to enforce their values. The Republican governors cannot tolerate urban areas led by Democratic politicians. Instead, they dictate to local governments from statehouses, imposing the will of social conservatives on everyone. Trump promises to do this on a national scale. There are indisputably racist and xenophobic messages from these Republicans, especially in Texas and Florida.

Forming a coalition with social conservatives doomed the Republican moderates. The Libertarian idealists made a similar mistake, assuming everyone supporting “states’ rights” meant letting state and local governments experiment to solve problems. The “states’ rights” advocates turned out to be racists just like the original “states’ rights” segregationists.

I enjoy reading and listening to content from The Bulwark and The Dispatch, which often look and sound a lot alike. As someone on the libertarian-left, meaning there’s absolutely no political home for me in the United States, I still find myself closer to what remains of the former “Eisenhower Republicans” than the Democratic Party. The story of The Bulwark fascinates me, and I encourage others to learn a bit about Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller. These two voices are what the GOP might have been — before the rise of Trump.

As several pundits have noted, It Was All a Lie (subtitled, “ow the Republican Party Became Donald Trump” by Stuart Stevens). Even the “Religious Right” didn’t actually care about morality, or they’d never have embraced someone as morally bankrupt as Donald Trump.

The Republican Party establishment offered a veneer of respectability, but the voters who elected them didn’t care about the ideals of Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, or Dwight D. Eisenhower. The voters were the Southern Strategy recruits brought to the party after 1964, the Dixiecrats. In the 1980s, Republican operative Lee Atwater embodied the efforts to bridge the Northern Republican WASPs with the Southern Evangelicals.

The Northern Republicans, the pro-business WASP party members, thought they could either convert or subdue the Southern members and voters.

It didn’t work. Today, the GOP is everything the Southern Democrats of the antebellum South were.

Where are the Republican leaders brave enough to stand for the rule of law?

It’s a simple question and one with a sadly simple answer: there are no brave Republican leaders.

The Bulwark and The Dispatch keep repeating this truism to an audience too small to matter. They know this, yet continue the quixotic battle against Trumpism.

Donald Trump leads a cult of personality. Republican “leaders” fear him and his followers. They dare not express a consistent message of “law and order.” There’s also something that the moderates cannot often admit to themselves. Many of the Republican leaders actually believe the same nonsense as their voters. 

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson embraces an inaccurate history of the United States. He is an admirer of faux historian David Barton. Johnson believes in a version of the Civil War in which the Southern States were victims. The Confederacy was simply trying to defend tradition and honor, in this telling.

Trump sells that twisted version of history, too. His supporters rally to Trump’s defense because they consider him the new Robert E. Lee.

Republican leaders will deny this. They will point to colleagues and announce, “See, we cannot be racists or sexists!” They’ve outdone even the late, great Lee Atwater. All in the name of Trump.