THE TRAITOR PARTY IS DESPERATE

“Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now. That is, we have a Government, and laws and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now, traitors and patriots and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter, and I trust, the stronger party.”

—Ulysses S. Grant in a letter to his father dated April 21, 1861

Millions of Donald Trump’s supporters and the majority of Republican leaders believe his narrative of victimization. On nearly all right wing sites, comment posts show they dismiss the prosecution for attempting a coup against the government he was sworn to lead without reading the indictment, claiming it is part of a far-reaching “witch hunt” against him.

Trump has spent months laying the ground for the indictment he knew was inevitable, convincing his supporters they should not trust anything prosecutors tell them. Yesterday afternoon, after he learned he had been indicted, he wrote on his Truth Social site, “Why didn’t they do this 2.5 years ago? Why did they wait so long? Because they wanted to put it right in the middle of my campaign. Prosecutorial Misconduct!”

That this is total and complete bullshit matters not to his MAGAt true believers.

The essential facts of the case are not in dispute and he didn’t deny any part of the indictment. Back in 2020 and since, Trump was astonishingly open in declaring he wished to overturn the election. In 2021, he called for the “termination” of the Constitution to reinstall him immediately.

Paragraph 1 hits him with the cruelest blow: “The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.” That is the singular fact upon which everything else rests.

The reaction of Republicans to this indictment for attempting a coup to overturn the 2020 election is neither surprising nor dismaying.

Even on conservative “Never Trump sites like The Dispatch, his defenders argue he had good- faith reasons for contesting the election results and did nothing more than pursue his legitimate, legal options. The recent New York Times-Siena College poll shows this view is shared by 74 percent of Republicans.

Trump’s coming trial - which will be by its existence “the Trial of the Century” and one of the most important political moments in U.S. history - is as much about the future of the GOP and who controls the party as it is about Trump’s efforts to overthrow the results of the election.

There will be renewed focus on what many Republican Congressmen and Senators did during the coup,including requests by some such as Scott “General Jack D. Ripper” to obtain pardons from Trump before he left office. What did the chairman of the Fwee-dumb Caucus think he needed to be pardoned for?

On Newsmax following the announcement of the indictment, Rudy Giuliani (Unindicted Co-Conspirator No. 1) admitted that Trump lied about the election being stolen, but said that is okay because lies are protected under the First Amendment, saying “Well, if you don’t agree with the regime, they try to disbar you and they try to imprison you. What does that sound like? Sounds like Communist China to me, not the United States of America. Biden has ruined our country. It’s disgrace what he’s done, and I don’t care if you hate Donald Trump. This is a violation of his right of free speech. You even have a right to lie under the First Amendment. But the people bringing this and this count they have here, conspiracy against rights. They should be indicted for conspiracy against rights for bringing this indictment. It’s a conspiracy against those.”

Let us be clear at this point. The First Amendment does protect your right to lie. The First Amendment does not protect your right to use that lie to promote a fraud. Yes, you have a right to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater; but if you know that is a lie, you will be arrested and charged with felony murder for the subsequent deaths, and for inciting the riot that led to those deaths. There is no First Amendment right to promote a crime.

The indictment doesn’t charge Trump with lying. The crime is that Trump used his lie to defraud the United States, to carry out an obstruction of government function, and try to take away our right to vote for the leaders of our choice in free and fair election.

Jonathan Turley is wrong (as usual). It wasn’t the lie that was criminal. It was the actions that are criminal.

The next time some MAGAt dumbass says that the First Amendment is under threat, do not let that pass unopposed. Inform that traitor what the truth is. There is no reason from here on out to let drunken old Uncle Fred spout his Faux Snooze lies. You have a perfect right to kick the senile old moron out of your home and tell him he is never to enter your home again.

You SHOULD do that! Make the MAGAts national Persona Non Grata.

The Republican reactions, as usual, follow Dear Leader’s lies and attempt to explain away the indictment with a conspiracy theory.

Marjorie Traitor Goon said she would try to defund special counsel Jack Smith’s office, an impossibility.

Qevin McQarthy - who the evening of January 6, 2021, stated on the floor of the House that Donald Trump was the author of the insurrection that day - issued the following official statement:

“We’ve recently learned: Hunter received money from China (contradicting President Biden’s claim); President Biden spoke with Hunter’s business associates over 20 times (contradicting what Biden previously claimed); Biden’s DOJ tried to secretly give Hunter broad immunity and admitted the sweetheart deal was unprecedented; And just yesterday a new poll showed President Trump is without a doubt Biden’s leading political opponent. Everyone in America could see what was going to come next: DOJ’s attempt to distract from the news and attack the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, President Trump. House Republicans will continue to uncover the truth about Biden Inc. and the two-tiered system of justice.”

Quiverin’ Qevin left out the part where the GOP’s star Biden bribery witnesses testified Monday that the President Of The United States did nothing wrong and never discussed his son’s business dealings. He failed to note that all of the “witnesses” who have testified in front of his committee chairmen running the investigations of the Democrats have been impeached as liars and shills paid by Republican Trump supporters.

Because those facts don’t fit with the conspiracy. The Speaker of the House of Representatives is just fine with spouting a series of lies, all of which directly contradict the one truthful statement he has made in the past two and a half years.

Prosecutors don’t need to prove what Trump believed. Truly proving belief is impossible. Good liars lie consistently. Pathological liars lie in a way that they even partly convince themselves. We know from experience that people have a great ability to believe what they want to believe or what is helpful for them to believe.

The standard isn’t what someone claims they believed. It’s whether it was a reasonable belief.

Even if Trump truly believed he was the winner of the election, which would entitle him to exhaust every judicial remedy to vindicate that belief, it wouldn’t entitle him to inspire a violent mob to ransack the capitol, to threaten the life of his vice president or to take the steps he did to halt the formal counting of electoral votes.

Jack Smith dispensed with the idea that Trump believed his claims of election fraud: “The defendant knew that they were false” and made them anyway to “create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

Last night, Faux Snooze’s alleged “comedian” Greg Gutfield attempted to get serious, saying that “any sensible American” should “take what’s happening very seriously, adding that “it should anger them.” But “the actual charges,” he continued, "you can’t take seriously. They are feelings masquerading as facts. They’re opinions trying to be passed off as crimes. It’s garbage dressed up with a legal thesaurus.” While Gutfeld told viewers that the charges against Trump are effectively “criminalizing thoughts” and “criminalizing speech,” Jesse Watters declared the charges were akin to “political war crimes” and “overkill,” and claimed that “this is the establishment terrified of Donald Trump’s reelection,” warning that if Trump is reelected, “Payback is going to be a you know what. And you guys started it.”

They continue to use the same threat of violence Trump used in mounting his coup in 2020.

For the first time since the Civil War, one of America’s two political parties is on the record attacking the laws and fabric of the nation it aspires to lead.

This isn’t about a presidential election or the smearing of Joe Biden. Those strategies were already in use by Republicans before the latest indictment.

The latest indictment of Trump is a mirror held up to show the country what the Republican Party has become.

The Republican Party is now a party of traitors. The question is, what should the rest of us do about it?

Trump’s strategy has been to politicize all of the indictments against him. He can’t argue the facts because he doesn’t have evidence to prove his innocence. His only path out is to move his problems from the legal realm to the political.

The Biden bribery conspiracy theory is vital to this because Trump and his Party of Traitors need to convince voters that the 80+ felony charges filed against Trump are illegitimate. They are desperate to deflect attention from Trump’s crimes, for which there are no exculpatory facts.

The good news is polling shows the American people outside of MAGA aren’t buying what the MAGAts are selling. Most Americans believe Trump committed crimes.

If Republicans can’t change that perception, it doesn’t matter what conspiracy theories they cook up about President Biden; the 2024 election will be all about Donald Trump, and they will lose.

Democrats can’t go all in to hammer Trump for these indictments yet, because that would help Republicans with their message that the indictments should be ignored by voters.

Democrats will use the indictments, but that won’t happen in a coordinated manner until the 2024 campaign. And then what voters will see will be impressive. The ads write themselves. McCarthy and McConnell’s January 6, 2021 statements of truth should be in heavy rotation.

Trump is bankrupting himself and the Republican Party raising funds to pay for lawyers with whom he can control his co-conspirators, and the base is getting “donation fatigue.” He raised less than half of what he raised in the week following the first indictment in New York, in the week following his indictment in Florida, and the results so far are similar this week. Democrats should have the advantage on the airways in terms of campaign advertising next year.

The risk is that voters don’t wake up, that they believe the false media narrative and the Republican lies to paint Biden and Trump as the same. The mainstream corporate media wants a close election because close elections drive interest, and interest equals profit. A close election is good for business, so expect all of them from the New York Times to CNN to try to paint a picture that legitimizes Trump as a “normal” candidate.

Trump and the Republicans have been very open about their intentions: they seek to regain power in order to destroy democracy and remake the United States government into an authoritarian state with centralized presidential power.

We have not faced an internal threat to our democratic existence like Trump and the Republican Party since the Civil War.

The issues that define 2024 are simple.

Democracy versus treason.

The fate of the United States as a free nation.

The survival of core concepts of law and justice.

Republicans and Trump have shown America who they are. Now it is time for the majority of the nation to come together to reject them.

This indictment likely increases the chances Biden will face an impeachment inquiry at some point during the next year as Republicans become ever more desperate to deflect public opinion from Trump’s crimes. It will be as bullshit an impeachment as was Newt Gingrich’s impeachment of Bill Clinton 25 years ago.

Please consider supporting That’s Another Fine Mess by becoming a paid subscriber for only $7/month or $70/year.

Comments are for paid subscribers.