It’s Simple: Trump Is Treated Like a Criminal Because He’s a Criminal

You are, I’m sure, familiar with Occam’s razor. It’s the old philosophical theorem that holds that the simplest explanation for an event, the one requiring the fewest assumptions, is probably the best explanation. If you wake up in the morning and there’s snow on the lawn, there are any number of possible explanations. Maybe some friends played a practical joke on you and dumped snow in your yard. Maybe space aliens visited during your slumber and dusted your lawn with the white stuff. Or—maybe it snowed last night.

Republicans keep asking, completely dishonestly, why so much criminal suspicion surrounds Donald Trump. They say it’s all being orchestrated by Joe Biden and Merrick Garland. They insist it’s an effort to interfere with his election campaign. They say a lot of things, but if ever there was a case where Occam’s razor applied, it’s this one. Trump is surrounded by criminal suspicion because he’s a criminal.

He’s been doing criminal things for decades. He just finally got cornered and caught on something. I’ve been writing recently that Democrats have to make sure every voter in the country remembers by Election Day, having heard it said thousands of times, that Donald Trump is a convicted felon. That’s true, and so far, Democrats and affiliated groups aren’t doing a terrible job of this. It’s a little sad that the best expression I’ve seen of this so far comes from a Republican—fiercely anti-Trump Republican Sarah Longwell’s group, Republican Voters Against Trump, has put up some blunt billboards around the country featuring photos of voters, with their names, under the statement: “I won’t vote for a convicted felon.”

But Democrats need to do more. Trump’s criminality, both past and future, should be central to the campaign. There’s a story to tell here, and it’s all true. No matter what the pollsters and the messaging gurus say, it’s impossible that all of this, taken together, doesn’t matter to swing voters.

To tell the story, you go through Trump’s record:

• convicted on 34 felony counts
• determined by a court to have raped a woman and ordered to pay her $83 million
• found by a court to have overvalued his assets and ordered to pay $364 million
• ordered to pay a $2 million settlement after admitting that he misused his charity, which the state of New York shut down
• found by the Justice Department to have refused to rent apartments to Black applicants; settled out of court
• sued by the Justice Department for violating proper procedures in the purchase of stock; paid $750,000 in civil fines
• charged by the New York State Lobbying Commission with violating state lobbying laws while purchasing a casino; paid $250,000 to settle fines
• found by the courts to have grossly defrauded students at the so-called Trump University and ordered to pay them $25 million in restitution

This list isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. It’s the tip of the tip. Trump has spent four decades being sued for something or other, typically not paying his bills, like those famous cases where he stiffed the poor vendors for his casinos, filing his own ridiculous countersuits and libel suits, and paying fines to make things go away. If indeed he actually paid the fines. I wonder if anyone has ever really gotten to the bottom of that. And I haven’t even mentioned the current charges around January 6 and the stolen classified documents because, so far, they’re just charges. But whatever the courts end up saying on those two matters, we’ve all seen with our own eyes the insurrection that he obviously incited (as of this January, 718 rioters had pleaded guilty to various federal charges, and 139 had been found guilty in court) and the photos of the boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago that he refused for months to turn over to the FBI.

Another important point: The criminality around Trump isn’t limited to Trump. Eight Trump associates were sentenced to prison time: Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen (joined the good side but still served time), Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Peter Navarro, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, and Allen Weisselberg. Others copped pleas: Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Cheseboro, and Scott Hall, another Georgia defendant.

This is not a coincidence. As GOP strategist Rick Wilson said, “Everything Trump touches dies”; he corrupts everything and everyone around him. And does anyone seriously think that if he gets back to the Oval Office, the same thing isn’t going to happen again? It’s going to be worse.

It’s going to be far worse. First, he’s going to start, on that dictatorial day one, by pardoning himself. Joe Biden and the Democrats need to try to get voters focused on this. If it happens, people will be completely outraged. Yes, the 38 percent or so who are MAGA world will be fine with it, but majorities will be flabbergasted at such an act. Is it possible to get voters pre-outraged about something that hasn’t happened? The polls will say no. But as I’ve written over and over lately, polls can either be accepted—or they can be changed.

Right now, what’s most terrifying to me about the polls is that they tell us emphatically that people forget. They forget all the horrible things Trump did. That includes presidential actions, like his lies to the American people about the pandemic, but it also includes his history of criminality and the way that history guarantees he’ll keep behaving that way.

In sum: Trump’s criminal record hardly begins and ends with Stormy Daniels. Somebody needs to make sure that, by November 5, voters know the entire, sordid history.

The only thing that was more fun yesterday than watching the Trump verdict come in was watching Republicans and assorted right-wingers sputter in outrage. I flipped on Fox News not long after the verdict was announced and caught Jeanine Pirro in the middle of an unhinged rant. “We have gone over a cliff in America,” she howled, concluding: “And in the end, with all this smoke and mirrors, at 34 counts, and a hooker, and a guy [who] according to a federal judge is a serial perjurer, we have convicted a former president of the United States of America.”

In a way, she got that last part right, even if her description of Stormy Daniels is unfair. But yes, Jeanine: That’s how the legal system works. If a jury returns 34 guilty counts in less than 10 hours of deliberation, it’s pretty clear that the prosecutor made his case. The jury of Donald Trump’s peers found Daniels and Michael Cohen to be credible witnesses. That must really frost the MAGA elites on Fox. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche tried and tried to discredit them, especially Cohen. Obviously, the jury wasn’t buying what he was selling.

And by the way: If Cohen and Daniels were such terrible witnesses, you know what action by the defense could have immediately canceled them out? Having Trump take the stand! He threatened that he was going to, but that was obviously bullshit, just like everything he says. Trump can’t take a witness stand, as any credible lawyer knows, because he lies every time he opens his jowly mouth. But if the alternate universe they live in on Fox was real, then Trump should definitely have taken the stand, because he would have obliterated Cohen and Daniels with his righteous truth-telling.

But of course he didn’t. Because every word he has said about this is a lie. He had sex with her. He paid her off. It was obviously about the 2016 campaign. We’ve known all these things for years, but, the law being what it is, we had to say “allegedly” and “if proven” and things like that, and we had to print Trump’s disavowals. Now we don’t. He did it.

Not in that alternate universe, though. Republicans … well, you know what they did after the verdict. Especially the vice presidential supplicants. Senator Tim Scott was maybe the most extreme, but actually all of them—Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Elise Stefanik, J.D. Vance, and more—were over the top.

That, we’d expect. More interesting were the elder statespersons of the party, who are to a person moral cowards but aren’t exactly card-carrying MAGA-heads. Senator John Barrasso: “The case in New York against President Trump has never been about justice. Democrats are weaponizing the justice system against a political opponent.” Mitch McConnell: “These charges never should have been brought in the first place. I expect the conviction to be overturned on appeal.”

But the dumbest of them all was Susan Collins’s statement, especially this part: “The district attorney, who campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump, brought these charges precisely because of who the defendant was rather than because of any specified criminal conduct.”

She got pounded on X/Twitter all night. It’s pretty hard to say that criminal charges are corrupt and illegitimate after a jury handed down an unequivocal thunderclap of a verdict like that. We should pause for a moment and think about the contempt for the justice system inherent in Collins’s words. Maybe she became disillusioned after her buddy Brett Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe.

Her smear of Alvin Bragg is a common one on the right. The reality is more complicated. Bragg was running for district attorney in 2021. Of course, Trump came up during the campaign—a lot. The incumbent D.A. at the time, Cy Vance, had opened an investigation into the Trump Organization. So naturally, Bragg and his main opponent were frequently asked what they’d do about Trump. And Bragg did boast about his prior work in the office of the state attorney general bringing “hundreds” of actions against Trump. But he did not say he was going to pursue Trump, and the campaign also turned on other issues.

And when Bragg did take office, what did he do? He ended the Trump Organization probe that Vance had opened. Two of his top prosecutors resigned in disgust over it. That probe was taken up by Letitia James, and it resulted, as we know, in a judge ruling that Trump had committed fraud for years and levying a hefty fine.

One has to wonder why Collins went out of her way to make this kind of statement. Maine isn’t exactly MAGA-land. She’s probably in her last term. On a personal level, Trump probably has very little use for her, and she probably doesn’t care much for him. So … why?

Because the cancer runs so deep now in the organs of the Republican Party that no officeholder is cancer-free. Did one GOP officeholder say we should respect the jury system? Yes, I know of Larry Hogan’s statement. But he is not currently an officeholder, with constituents to offend. And look at what Trump’s campaign manager said in response to Hogan. That guarantees that no one else will try to say anything measured.

The party is an appendage of one man. Republicans want to talk about banana republics? They are the Banana Republicans. This is like Argentina under Perón or the Philippines under Marcos.

And to what manner of man are they appended? Let’s review. He’s a rapist—yes, a judge used that word and said it was accurate, after, remember, another jury of Trump’s peers ruled against him. He’s a massive tax cheat. Six of his political associates, plus Allen Weisselberg (and Cohen, if you want to count him), have been sentenced to prison. Three took plea deals to avoid prison. And now, he’s a convicted felon.

The emperor is stripped barer and barer with each passing month, and the Republican response is to praise his finery more passionately than ever.

By now, we’ve seen poll after poll showing that voters look back fondly on Donald Trump’s presidency. The polls suggest that millions of people forget completely, for example, Trump’s shambolic panic when the pandemic was coming, his total failure to order up ventilators and masks, his serial lies that the 15 Covid cases would soon be down to zero, and so on—behavior so obviously disqualifying that failing to see it is, to my mind, akin to seeing a man holding a smoking gun over a dead body and denying that the man was the shooter.

Lately, these polls have been joined by other polls that say something just as false and just as dangerous. These polls show people giving Trump credit for things that Biden has accomplished and people being miffed at Biden for all manner of bad stuff that just isn’t real. In the latter category, we find a Harris Poll (yes, Mark Penn, but even so) showing the following hall-of-mirrors results, as Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect: 56 percent of Americans think the country is in a recession, 49 percent believe the stock market is down, and 49 percent also believe unemployment is at an all-time high.

We are not close to a recession, which is a decline in gross domestic product in two consecutive quarters. That did happen in early 2022, but the second-quarter dip was very shallow, and most economists didn’t call it a recession. The Dow is up 8,000 points since Biden took office. Unemployment is at its lowest level in half a century.

Meyerson fingers—correctly, I think—the fact that so many people get their “news” from social media, which is usually just a collection of video and photo images that can pack an emotional punch but that explain and contextualize nothing. Social media, as Meyerson wrote, “has a built-in bias for the negative, the apocalyptic, the unedited, and uncurated.” A steady stream of clips showing high gas prices or rubble in Gaza or students being arrested is bound to lead the consumer of said clips to some dark conclusions about the country teetering on the knife’s edge of chaos and collapse, which, once formed, facts are powerless to dislodge.

There’s another recent survey, one of the most depressing and telling I’ve seen this year, that seems to confirm this too. This was an NBC News poll that divided respondents based on where they got their news. Pay attention here. Among people who don’t follow political news at all, Trump led Biden 53–27. Among social media users, Trump led 46–42. But among people who actually read newspapers, Biden led—ready?—by 70–21.

Pretty grim. But it’s even worse. This week on his Substack, New America fellow Lee Drutman wrote a really interesting piece about how our brains process thoughts about the past and the present. When we think about the past, he writes, we always remember it as better than it was. It’s called nostalgia bias.

But when we think about the present? We tend to think of it as worse than it actually is. This is called negativity bias. As Drutman put it: “Our brains are deeply attuned to possible threats, and so we have a strong negativity bias in how we process the present. In an environment of nonstop national media and hyper-partisan confrontational politics, we are constantly getting triggered. This makes us especially likely to see the present moment as a crisis.”

Social media of course plays a key role here too. A 10-second video of undocumented people crossing the Rio Grande tells the brain: “Chaos!” And Biden is doing nothing. The people may have been apprehended or turned back, who knows. But those 10 seconds have done their job.

Our brains have always worked liked this, as Drutman readily acknowledges. But Trump has made it all worse by constantly carrying on about how awful things are today—the sweeping and totally false generalizations about how no one is safe anywhere anymore; the unprovable (but, crucially for his purposes, un-dis-provable) assertions that Ukraine and Gaza and so on would never have happened if the election hadn’t been stolen from him.

And what Trump is doing, by the way, isn’t simple nostalgia. Nostalgia is an innocent pining for our younger days, when we looked better and our backs didn’t hurt and we had more sex. What Trump is doing is much darker. What Trump is doing is fascism, which throughout its history, as Drutman notes, is obsessed with tropes of social decline.

This is where we are, and this is really what Biden is up against—what perhaps any president would be up against in this jittery and overcaffeinated age. Even Trump fell victim to it in 2020 to some extent. But on balance, Trump benefits, and I’d say tremendously, because a media environment that encourages people not to think but only to react is a perfect mate for a political candidate who does the same.

Yet I’m not saying all is lost. I don’t think it is. There are millions of Americans who reject Trumpism outright. There are millions of people who seek facts, remember the awful things Trump did, read newspapers. Trump has lost a lot more elections (if you count the ones since 2016 when he was “on the ballot,” as it were) than he’s won. Still, it’s different now that Trump is out of office and can spin myths about his tenure and himself that too many people are willing to believe.

The best counter to Trump’s mythmaking about the past? Insistently telling people about the ugly future Trump promises. Read Jamelle Bouie today on Trump’s deportation plans. I have to believe most Americans do not want their country to do that. The Democrats’ answer to Trump’s obsession with the past is to warn people about a Trump-led future.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Donald Trump came out shooting blanks with his usual baggy, insecure rhetoric after agreeing to two debates with Joe Biden. “Crooked Joe Biden is the WORST debater I have ever faced,” “He can’t put two sentences together!” et cetera. He does it because he knows the media reports it and there are still people who fall for it.

The truth, of course, is that Trump is a terrible debater. In this as in everything else, he wants people to forget the past and ignore the truth. So let’s remind him, and everyone, of what happened when Trump and Biden met in 2020.

The first debate, hosted by Fox, took place in Cleveland on September 29. Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died; Trump had nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court three days before, so the court was on everyone’s mind, and of course the pandemic.

Trump did two main things. First, he lied a lot. He’d reduced prescription drug prices by “80 to 90 percent”; insulin was getting “so cheap, it’s like water”; he’d “brought back [college] football.” Second, he interrupted and interrupted. He turned the whole thing into a shitshow, because he knows that shit benefits from shitshows.

But the main thing he did was send that little message to the Proud Boys: “Stand back and stand by.” Those words seemed self-contradictory to me, but not to the Proud Boys themselves, who took it as a clear order to await his further instructions, which came in the build-up to January 6, 2021.

Result? Biden mopped the floor with him. A CNN poll found that viewers favored Biden’s performance by—get this—60 to 28 percent. Think about that 28. It means that even a good chunk of MAGA-heads couldn’t bring themselves to say he won. Some polls were closer, but Biden won them all.

For the second debate, October 22, 2020, in Nashville, NBC decided to cut the microphones when Biden and Trump weren’t speaking, which limited the interruptions. Well, wait! Actually, Nashville was supposed to be the third debate. The second debate, scheduled for October 15 in Miami, never happened; it was canceled because Trump had tested positive for Covid. The debate commission suggested holding it virtually. Biden said yes. Trump backed out and held a rally instead. This is worth remembering.

OK, back to Nashville, which did happen: Trump said he’d done more for Black Americans than any president with the “possible exception” of Abraham Lincoln. He made a lot of comments ducking responsibility on the pandemic. It was less of a madhouse. And Biden won that debate, CNN found, by 53 to 39 percent.

Flash-forward. Biden is four years older and definitely a step slower. No use denying it. It’s hard to imagine him delivering a dominating performance. For my money, the best thing he can do on a stage with Trump has nothing to do with policy. He should needle Trump and get under his skin: about Trump constantly confusing Biden with Barack Obama; about confusing Jimmy Carter with Jimmy Connors; about praising Hannibal Lecter as a “wonderful man.” And about more consequential things too, like his stated plans for his second term that would turn the country into a fascist state (on this, read our new issue, it is excellent and chilling). But no, Biden probably does not have it in him to crush Trump in a debate.

In sum: Biden may not win these debates, but Trump will definitely lose them. He’ll lose them the same way he lost them last time, by lying and interrupting and sneering and being an off-putting bully. It’s true that Biden has a record to defend this time, and Trump will attack attack attack. He’ll probably score some points. But he’ll overdo it. He always does.

That is, if he shows up. This week, he started yelping instantly about the debate format—the absence of an audience, the cutting off of the mics. Amanda Marcotte in Salon noticed that Republicans “are already spinning Trump’s faceplant even before it happens.” Lara Trump whined on Fox that the debates are “rigged so heavily in Joe Biden’s favor, but everything always is.”

My guess is that the first one will happen. Trump is delusional enough to believe that he’s going to wipe the floor with Biden. Then he’ll see that Biden isn’t the blithering idiot he believes him to be and can actually hold his own on a debate stage, and the debate won’t have any clear winner or loser, but because Biden simply isn’t an aggressive asshole and raging egomaniac and will come across as more empathetic, he’ll win the insta-polls by 10 to 15 points, and Trump will eventually find an excuse to skip the second one and identify some little Nuremberg where he can hold a rally and whimper about being the most persecuted man in the history of the planet.

The last few days remind me more broadly that we must always bear in mind all the constituent elements of authoritarian fascism. There are the obvious ones we think of immediately, like contempt for democracy and reliance on a narrative of resentment against the “vermin” who are destroying the country. But the less obvious ones are important too. Staggering corruption is always, always, always a characteristic of fascist regimes, and Trump already proved this in term one, with the flagrant and constant violations of the emoluments clause.

And another constant feature is the whining. The system is so unfair to us. Mussolini used this trope, as did Hitler, as have they all. Everything is everybody else’s fault. And these people try to say that liberals are snowflakes?

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

As many have observed, democracies don’t die overnight. There’s no One Big Event that does it. It happens bit by bit. Noticing it requires paying very close attention and connecting the dots as you go along, and most people don’t have the time or dedication to do that.

So I draw your attention to a new and ominous development this week: It’s now basically settled that Donald Trump’s running mate will be with him 1000 percent on denying unfavorable election results. Doing so became a litmus test this week. South Carolina GOP Senator Tim Scott is chiefly to blame, but of course it’s also Trump, and the entire cast of craven jellyfish who are today’s Republican Party.

As you’ve probably read, Scott was on Meet the Press Sunday and, under questioning from host Kristen Welker, refused six times to say he’d accept the election results. The things he did say were ludicrous: “This is an issue that is not an issue so I’m not going to make it an issue.” “I’m not going to answer your hypothetical question when, in fact, I believe the American people are speaking today on the results of the election.” “This is why so many Americans believe that NBC is an extension of the Democrat Party.”

The same day, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum ran for the hills when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked him about potential political violence after the election. He spat out some evasive nonsense about how the important thing about the election is that “both sides feel good about how it was counted.” We all know what that means: If one party (gee, which one?) doesn’t “feel good” about the vote count, then violence might be justified.

These are, in one way, dismissible men. But these are not dismissible comments. This is new. And it’s worth thinking about.

In 2016, Trump went around saying things like, “I will totally accept” the election results “if I win.” But it wasn’t yet holy scripture. In fact, that fall, Trump’s running mate avowed that the GOP would play by the rules. “We will absolutely accept the results of the election,” Mike Pence told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on October 16.

This was very important at the time. It allowed people to think Trump was just blustering, wasn’t to be taken seriously. And his position was seen as a clear liability. Three days after Pence’s Meet the Press appearance, Trump debated Hillary Clinton. Trump refused to affirm to moderator Chris Wallace that he’d accept the election results. Even Republicans asked by Politico agreed that it was Trump’s worst moment of the debate. Said an Ohio Republican: “His answer on not accepting the results of the election [is] disqualifying—and that’s not an ‘elite’ position.” Added a New Hampshire GOPer: “Refusing to accept the outcome of a legitimate American election and refusing to commit to the peaceful transition of power is disqualifying. Stunning.”

Those Republicans reflected a consensus then among the Republicans Politico asked, and to some extent among rank-and-file Republicans too—53 percent of Republicans even told Politico that Clinton won that debate. The idea that a major party candidate would reject election results was disqualifying, or seemed to be.

Of course, Trump won, so the proposition wasn’t tested then. In 2020, he did the same thing, casting doubt on the veracity of the pandemic-era results throughout the campaign. And we know what came of that: January 6. On that day, remember, 139 House members voted against certifying the election results, while 72 voted to certify (or were absent). Eight GOP senators voted not to certify, while 43 voted to certify Joe Biden’s victory.

Those voting results were depressing enough, but it must be asked: Would we get similar results today? Or will we next January 6, if Trump is declared the loser and contests the results, as he all but inevitably will?

I think this time it would be worse, maybe far worse. As Scott’s and Burgum’s dodges testify, conventional wisdom has changed. Now, it is assured that Trump’s vice presidential choice will, instead of offering Pence’s 2016 reassurances, be right there with Trump in threatening not to accept the results. The new Trump-installed chair of the party, Michael Whatley, is a 2020 election denier whose chief appeal to Trump was that he’s “a Stop the Steal guy.” And the new co-chair, of course, is Lara Trump. Around 60 RNC employees were handed their papers in March. The new application process includes asking job-seekers whether they think the 2020 election was stolen.

The upshot here should be clear enough. This November, the entire party will be armed to fight an adverse election result. This is new—worse, even, than 2020 and 2021. Scott and Burgum helped cement this posture as the new conventional wisdom this week. But really, they were shaping conventional wisdom far less than they were allowing themselves to be shaped by it. If they hadn’t said what they said, they’d be instantly tossed from Trump’s short list.

And the rest of the party? Please. They’ll fall into one of two camps. They’ll enthusiastically parrot the accepted line. Or they’ll use the “It’s not an issue, because Donald Trump will be elected our next president” dodge. And those in the latter camp know very well that the road is littered with the political carcasses of Republicans who defied Trump.

So, again: If January 6, 2025 comes around, and Congress is confronted with a situation similar to that other January 6, how many Republicans will stand up for democracy this time? Jellyfish may not have backbones, but they can still sting.