Several top Republicans, after former President Donald Trump was indicted on federal charges, railed against the FBI and the Department of Justice.
Not too long ago, the Republican Party described itself as the party of law and order, with Donald Trump calling himself “the law and order candidate” when he ran in 2016.
More recently, the GOP attempted in 2022 to tie the “defund the police” slogan popularized by some leftist activists into the de facto position of the Democratic Party, even if the actual truth was always far from that.
But now, with former President Trump facing a wave of legal jeopardy that includes two multi-count indictments so far, the GOP has suddenly become the party that rails against the excesses of the criminal justice system.
As pointed out by the Associated Press, this type of attitude has become much more prevalent in the week since it was announced that Trump had been indicted in federal court on 37 counts, most of them under the Espionage Act.
Ever since then, Republicans in Congress, and even among Trump’s opponents in the presidential race have defended the former president, in public statements and fundraising emails. There were claims of a “two-tiered system of justice” that is rigged against Republicans, as well as insinuations that Trump was indicted as a “distraction” from the allegations that President Biden accepted bribes while he was vice president.
“The mounting legal jeopardy Trump finds himself in has quickly become a political rallying cry for the Republicans, many of whom acknowledged they had not fully read the 49-page federal indictment but stood by the indicted former president, adopting his grievances against the federal justice system as their own,” the AP said of the post-indictment dynamic in the GOP.
As a result of that, in part, Trump maintains a massive lead in the Republican nomination contest, leading the latest weekly Morning Consult tracking poll with 59 percent support, giving him a 40 percent lead over second-place Ron DeSantis. None of the candidates who recently formally entered the race, DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Chris Christie, has yet become much of a factor. And since Trump is likely to remain indicted, if he’s not on trial, for the duration of the Republican race, that dynamic is unlikely to change.
As of early Thursday, per Reuters, Trump had raised more than $7 million since he was indicted, including $2 million at a fundraiser at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey on Tuesday night. The remaining money from that fundraising haul came from online donations received in recent days.
Among the biggest supporters of Trump after the indictment, somewhat ludicrously, are several of the Republican presidential candidates who are going up against him. As pointed out by Joshua Green at Bloomberg News,
“On Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump surrendered to federal authorities—but not to his Republican presidential opponents. Most of them, however, have all but surrendered to him,” Green noted. “Even before Trump and his ever-changing legal team rolled up to a Miami courthouse to face 37 felony counts ranging from willful retention of national defense information to conspiracy to obstruct justice, the Republicans who stand to gain the most from his legal travails—the ones ostensibly running for president!—were among his most vocal defenders.”
Some Republicans, most of them already opposed to Trump, have agreed that Trump did something wrong when it came to the documents.
“The real question is, why did he do it?” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-UT, said of the accusations in the indictment. “Why should the country go through all this angst and turmoil when all he had to do is turn in the documents when asked?” Romney voted to convict Trump in both of his impeachment trials.
“It looks pretty damning to me,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said of the indictments.
Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
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