Trumpworld’s Post-Conviction Spin Cycle

It’s a testament to Donald Trump’s Teflon reputation that it took so long for him to become a convicted felon. No, it wasn’t the slates of fake electors or the refusal to return classified documents or the numerous allegations of sexual misconduct that ultimately ensnared him in a criminal trial. It was, instead, the falsification of business records that covered up a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. However, while felons in some cases cannot vote, they can still run for president. And if that felon happens to be Donald Trump, he can also have a chorus of powerful Republicans—who pretend to represent the party of “law and order”—debase themselves by angrily coming to his defense and assailing the legal system. Indeed, hell hath no fury like Trumpworld when Trump is held responsible for his actions.

The general response to Trump’s verdict has, in some ways, been a uniformly clear conspiratorial throwback to his two impeachments as well as the January 6 hearings: that all of this can be boiled down to a “Democratic witch hunt.” “This was a purely political exercise,” wrote House Speaker Mike Johnson, who got his job partly because of his own efforts to undermine the 2020 election. Gubernatorial loser and Senate candidate Kari Lake called the trial “a shameful political stunt.” “Little” Marco Rubio, a nickname Trump made famous, compared the proceedings to something that might happen in Cuba, where they don’t have jury trials: “This is what you see in communist countries.”

In fact, the notion that Trump’s trial is somehow fundamentally un-American seemed to be really high up on the list of GOP talking points. Florida governor Ron DeSantis called it a “kangaroo court,” as did Trump lapdog Ken Paxton. “This was a sham show trial,” said the Texas attorney general. “The Kangaroo Court will never stand on appeal.” Jim Jordan, a member of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government—which he’s repeatedly weaponized himself—also echoed: “The Manhattan kangaroo court shows what happens when our justice system is weaponized by partisan prosecutors in front of a biased judge with an unfair process.”

But while many Trump surrogates appeared to go about their messaging in lockstep, there were also some rather stark inconsistencies, suggesting that Trump’s verdict was not something that Republicans had a clear handle on. On Fox News last week, radio host Hugh Hewitt argued that “Trump is in a much stronger position today than he was” before the verdict, to which Kellyanne Conway strenuously agreed. This, suffice to say, is quite the take. Much of the post-verdict polling suggests that Trump’s conviction won’t dramatically sway voters in either direction, since the electorate’s views are already so entrenched. And even if Hewitt and Conway were correct, they should really be asking themselves why Trump is bothering putting up a defense in his other three cases, since convictions are gifts.

Another messaging misfire came from vice presidential hopeful Tim Scott: On Fox News over the weekend, the South Carolina senator claimed that Never Trumpers—many of whom repudiated the former president nearly a decade ago and may ultimately pivot to Joe Biden—are now going to reenter the MAGA tent over Trump’s guilty verdict. This, again, is a strange assertion when Never Trumpers originally left the tent because of the very shenanigans like his trial. Why, then, would a guilty verdict lure them back?

Perhaps the weirdest display of dissonance, though, came from Mike Lee, who quite simply couldn’t seem to make up his mind on whether the trial was a boon or a bust. At 5:15 p.m. ET Thursday, the Utah senator tweeted that, by pushing for and securing Trump’s conviction, progressives have “guaranteed Trump’s election.” But a mere 20 minutes later, the senator appeared to turn on a dime, saying of the trial, “I can’t imagine a bigger, more impactful contribution to the Biden campaign.” Basically, it’s Schrödinger’s verdict: simultaneously good for fundraising numbers and bad for public perception. (One poll conducted immediately following his guilty verdict found that 10% of GOP voters were less inclined to vote for the former president.)

In some ways, the political aftermath of the Trump trial is vaguely reminiscent of when the Access Hollywood video came out in 2016. At the time, Trumpworld fell into a great silence of uncertainty. Trump’s political acolytes are similarly uncertain now—only loudly so—as it dawns upon them that Don’s Teflon might finally be wearing off. It probably didn’t help to see Trump himself out there desperately attempting to work the refs by repeating his pedantic treatise on ledgers. “Did you ever see a ledger?” he asked during a highly edited Fox and Friends appearance Sunday. “Did you ever study accounting? The line’s like about an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. You can’t write the story. But there is no story, if you pay a legal expense and you write it down as a legal expense.”

Trump has always been able to maintain a grip on a certain percentage of American voters because of his infinite capacity for shamelessness in the face of shamefulness. He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t admit when he’s wrong. He never questions his own bad decisions. But now, a jury has found Trump to be guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, making him the first president to ever be convinced of a felony—and possibly the first presidential candidate who won’t even be able to vote for himself. In Trump’s world, this reality doesn’t really matter. It’s something that can be endlessly spun and mangled and perverted into a word salad of projection and lies. But when it comes to wiping off a stain that’s this indelible, Trumpworld is going to have a much harder time. And for now, all they can seem to manage is smudging it.