The GOP Hasn’t Learned a Damn Thing

Photo courtesy of The Hill

It was another moment for the GOP to shake itself loose from the former president. With news of a likely and imminent indictment from a grand jury in Manhattan swirling, GOP leaders faced a few choices: support the rule of law and let the process work as intended; remain silent in the face of what likely will be mounting criminal charges against Donald Trump; or rush to prove they are still beholden to him and go on the attack.

Guess which they chose?

Let’s helicopter over the GOP hellscape and take account of the damage it is inflicting, both to democracy and itself, since Trump announced that he would be arrested sometime today (though it’s likely sometime later this week) and for his supporters to “protest” and “take back our nation.”

The GOP have weaponized the federal government, again

The most stark, egregious and sycophantic response came, perhaps unsurprisingly, from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee as well as the newly formed and ironically named “Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” Jordan is a staunch Trump ally, and he wasn’t going to miss any opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty by threatening the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg. As indication of what the thinks of the charges, Jordan recently described the cover-up of the Stormy Daniels hush-money payments, made on the eve of a presidential election, as a “bookkeeping error from seven years ago.”

Rep. Jordan, along with House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil (R-WI), sent a letter to Bragg demanding that he appear in Congress to testify in connection with the hush-money investigation. They criticized Bragg’s actions as an “unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority” and declared they intended to investigate whether his office used federal public safety funds as part of the probe—implying that these would be withheld if they were. “Your decision to pursue such a politically motivated prosecution … requires congressional scrutiny about how public safety funds appropriated by Congress are implemented by local law-enforcement agencies,” they wrote.

This is all nonsense.

First, Congress has no jurisdiction and therefore no authority over a state prosecutor. For a party that supposedly supports states’ rights, this is an incredible overreach. It should concern anyone who worries about federal bullying of state level law enforcement.

Second, an investigation of whether a presidential candidate paid hush money illegally is not in the least way unprecedented. Around 12 years ago, former presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards was indicted by a grand jury on six counts of campaign finance violations for attempting to cover up hush-money payments to his mistress. He beat those charges, arguing that he did it to spare his wife embarrassment. This is actually one of the reasons many legal observers are worried that Trump will beat similar charges here, too. But to claim it’s unprecedented is to ignore history, which the GOP is fairly good at.

Third, the chairs of these committees know, or at least ought to know, that federal funds allocated to local prosecutors don’t go directly to specific prosecutions. That didn’t stop Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from acting like he’s trying to do something to help Trump. “I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions,” McCarthy wrote. But in New York, according to the NYC Council’s Finance Division, the annual budget for the District Attorney’s office of nearly $459 million includes only $1.7 million of federal funding. This comprises “various grants that support crime victims’ compensation and advocacy programs, efforts to prevent intoxicated driving, motor vehicle theft and insurance fraud, gender-based violence advocacy, opioid programming, and justice assistance grants.”

In short, they three GOP chairs don’t have the authority to do this; they’re ignoring history to claim an indictment is unprecedented; and they’re wrong about how federal funds get spent. I’d tell them to go do their homework, but this isn’t about actual governance. It’s about performative politics aimed at an audience of one and his ardent but ill-informed followers.

The impending indictment is upending the GOP primary

Another question many understandably had was how the growing field of GOP presidential contenders would handle the news of Trump’s indictment. After all, it’s not as if it’s been a big secret that this moment was coming, so they had months to prepare their responses. But based on how things have gone so far, it appears they were still caught largely off-guard.

The standard response among most candidates, whether announced or unannounced officially, has been to criticize Bragg for politicizing the investigation while saying little to nothing about whether Trump actually is guilty or innocent. Former vice-president Mike Pence called the matter “politically charged” and “not what the American people want to see.” And long-shot candidate Vivek Ramaswamy warned, “A Trump indictment would be a national disaster,” adding “It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its political rivals.”

The biggest fireworks came when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, considered to be Trump’s biggest competition in the GOP race, broke his silence on the matter. He tried to have it both ways, condemning the investigation as political and claiming he wanted nothing to do with the manufactured circus, while getting in a pot-shot at Trump along the way by bringing up “porn star” and “hush money” twice.

“I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” DeSantis said to some uncomfortable laughter on Monday. “But what I can speak to is that if you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction and he chooses to go back many many years ago to try to use something about porn star hush money payments, that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office. And I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”

Trump did not like that one bit. He went for a literal below-the-belt shot in response. Calling him by his favorite nickname, “Ron DeSanctimonious,” while amplifying a decades-old picture of DeSantis posing with young women while he was a high school teacher, Trump wrote that DeSantis “will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are ‘underage’ (or possibly a man!). I’m sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do!”

The exchange led Fox’s Bret Baier to remark, as he reviewed the exchange of the leading GOP presidential contenders on his program, “We’re in a surreal place right now.” 

Welcome to the Trump nightmare you helped create.

How will voters react?

If the hardcore GOP and even the bumbling new owner of Twitter Elon Musk are to be believed, indicting Trump will only help him politically, and he’ll come back to win in a landslide.

I remain skeptical that it will help him.

While there may be a short-term polling bump for Trump, especially among his most ardent supporters, that isn’t likely to last as more facts and evidence come out, and as further charges likely land later this year. The only way Trump wins in 2024 is to expand his appeal among voters, not to energize his own base over and over. But the prospect of electing a man under multiple federal and state indictments could simply prove too much for the average middle-of-the-road American citizen. These voters fled the GOP in droves during the last few national contests, leading to losses and disappointing results three elections in a row. 

The rush to Trump’s side also creates a difficult branding problem for Republicans, one that has dogged them since January 6. The party has long prided itself on being for law and order, but here they are now effectively coming after law enforcement, once again. They are doing this while seeming perfectly okay with, and ready to give a pass on, something that looks and feels very much like an illegal cover up, at least based on what is publicly known. 

That crime just happens not to be the biggest one Trump committed—just one he could actually get nailed on. So to many, that’s a lot like Al Capone going to jail for tax evasion. The American people were okay with that, and they might also be okay with Trump finally being held to account in some way for the many crimes they know he has committed.

Importantly, the outpouring of MAGA anger into the streets that was feared around a Trump indictment so far has not materialized. The process of booking, releasing and then trying Trump for the hush money cover up crime will initially excite but ultimately fade from the public’s memory, especially if new and more dangerous indictments land around his more recent efforts to overturn the 2020 election and obstruct the recovery of top secret materials.

Indeed, it would not surprise me if in a few months the most memorable thing about this first indictment will be Trump’s mugshot, which will be seen everywhere and remind us all that Trump is very much a criminal who needs to face the music. And if that’s the image, if that’s their guy, if that’s who the GOP really wants as their candidate, then they really haven’t learned a damn thing.