Trump Goes All In: A Key Admission, Obstruction in Plain Sight, and a Call for Violence

Photo: AFP via Getty

Within the course of 24 hours, former President Trump lobbed a series of head-spinning volleys to his followers at a rally in Texas and online via a released statement. As prosecutors and investigators close in on his inner circle, obtaining damning evidence and testimony from witnesses and White House aides while putting the squeeze on his family members and closest allies, Trump apparently has decided to double down. Through his speech and his statement, Trump

• Admitted that he sought to have Pence “overturn” the 2020 election;

• Dangled pardons to January 6 insurrectionists and allies, obstructing justice in plain view; and

• Used the inflammatory language of the January 6 rally to urge his supporters to protest should he be arrested.

Let’s unpack.

The Admission

In a written statement released last night, Trump for the first time came out publicly to assert what his legal advisors such as John Eastman had been privately urging: that Vice President Pence somehow had the unilateral right to “change the outcome” and “could have overturned the Election!” Trump mocked efforts by lawmakers, including “wacky Susan Collins” to amend the Electoral Count Act, arguing that if it was the case that the Vice President had “absolutely no right” to change the election results “despite fraud and many other irregularities” then why pass legislation that would not allow him to change the result? This of course ignores the straightforward desires of Congress to clarify that the Vice President did not ever have this authority. As Rep. Zoe Lofgren told CNN, “It’s an old statute and some of our colleagues in the House had tried to exploit ambiguities in it.”

Trump’s argument about the vice president’s role is nonsense and easily disposed of. After all, why bother having a national election at all if one person, who is often up for reelection, can simply alter the outcome? Were this the case, as one commentator noted, this would mean Vice President Harris could simply overturn the 2024 election by decree.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who is one of two Republicans serving on the January 6 Committee, noted the confessional nature of Trump’s own language around “overturning” the outcome:

“He could have overturned the election.” This is an admission, and a massively un-American statement. It is time for every Republican leader to pick a side…Trump or the Constitution, there is no middle on defending our nation any more.

Trump no doubt is worried that the piles of evidence showing he sought to overturn the election via Mike Pence will soon come out in the open, and he is maneuvering to get ahead of it. Apparently realizing he cannot successfully claim he never tried to undo the election, he now has pivoted to claiming he did nothing wrong. (We have seen this act before, by the way, when he claimed his call to the Ukrainian president was “perfect” even though it sought to insert a bogus investigation by a foreign country into our electoral politics while threatening to withhold military support for that country.)

The Dangled Pardons

In keeping with his tendency to place his crimes in plain sight, Trump also indicated he would fix the Jan 6 defendants’ legal problems. “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he told the gathered MAGA supporters at his Texas rally “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.” Commentators were quick to note that this is a kind of public obstruction of justice, putting on notice any who are under investigation or indictment for their involvement in January 6 that they might wish to stay in his good graces and not rat him out.

The power of the presidential pardon is not absolute. If misused, for example in exchange for money or a quid pro quo, it can comprise an abuse of power that is an impeachable offense or even criminal obstruction of justice. Interestingly, the Justice Department maintains a policy not to prosecute sitting presidents, even for obstruction of justice—the very reason Mueller gave for not recommending that action at the time even while reserving the question for later. No such limitation exists presently now that Trump, who is not the sitting president, arguably is again committing obstruction in plain sight.

The tricky part, as always, is that Trump typically leaves enough ambiguity and dog whistles as to create room for doubt, even as his followers and acolytes receive the message loud and clear. For example, in his speech he said, “If it requires pardons, we will give them pardons,” allowing him later to argue if necessary that he was only offering pardons to innocent people wrongfully accused, which is of course entirely fine. As the longtime head of a family and organization deeply steeped in illegal behavior, Trump knows how to cover his tracks, even when he lays them deeply and publicly.

Calls to Violence

The most disturbing part of Trump’s speech was his not very subtle threat to the prosecutors who are seeking to bring him to justice. “If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had ... in Washington D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt,” he told his followers.

The inclusion of “racist” is worth noting here. The current Manhattan DA, the New York Attorney General, and the Fulton County DA are all African American, and Trump is now telling his supporters that he is being attacked by them because he, like most of his supporters, is white. There is of course nothing in the record to suggest any improper racial motivation for his prosecution, but that doesn’t matter to Trump or his flock. The introduction of race into an already explosive political environment seeks to add a disturbing, if predictable, layer to this unfolding drama.

Using ethnic hate and fear to deflect blame is from an old playbook. The Nazis rose to power on the Big Lie of a Jewish, Communist conspiracy against the German economy. Blaming race for his troubles permits Trump to flip the script from “prosecuted” to “persecuted” far more readily.

Moreover, by floating the idea that these prosecutors are somehow doing something “wrong or illegal,” Trump is summoning the same energy that served him well on January 6: Invent a wrong (like the election or a political, racist witch hunt), whip up your base with it, then ask them to gather by the tens of thousands in protest, most likely violently. Here, in a single sentence, Trump deftly tied the investigations—two of which are for tax scams that began prior to his presidency—to “corrupt” elections which have zero to do with them but which give patriotic gloss to what he's asking of his supporters.

When Trump stirs up and then unleashes his crowds, he knows there are radical elements among them that will do violence in his name. It has happened before, most notably on January 6, and thus far he has paid no price for it, neither politically nor with his own freedom. So emboldened, Trump has grown even more dangerous. We should make no mistake that his calls for protests are a direct challenge to the lawful prosecution of his crimes, as it places a target upon those investigators and law enforcement and raises the political stakes of his arrest—something he must sense could happen not long from now should the investigations proceed. And if that happens, Trump fully intends to play the part of the great white martyr to the evil Black Democrats and sear that image into the minds of the MAGA faithful.