The ‘party of law and order’, with a criminal at the helm, loses its mind over Trump verdict

Gage Skidmore

So, it happened. A former president was found guilty in a court of law by a jury of his peers. Thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, in violation of New York Penal Law 175.10. The leader of the so-called “party of law and order” is a convicted criminal.

The reaction from the MAGA faithful was swift. The Speaker of the House called the trial a “purely political exercise, not a legal one”, bemoaning “the weaponization of the justice system” and suggesting that Joe Biden was behind it all. That sentiment was echoed by many Republicans, including potential vice presidential picks Tim Scott and Marco Rubio. Retribution was also a theme for Rubio, who wrote “don’t just get angry about this travesty, get even!” on X. Lindsey Graham declared “two can play at that game”. A steady stream of GOP members of Congress made the rounds on right wing media, in a cynical act of sycophancy.

As The Guardian noted, “it soon became clear that one of America’s two major political parties was determined to undermine faith in the US judicial system with expressions of rage and demands for revenge, creating an alternative view of the US in which Joe Biden is a clear and present danger to US democracy.”

Such rhetoric is dangerous and experts are already warning that the current Republican project to damage the legitimacy of American institutions could have a profound impact. Timothy Naftali, a historian and senior research fellow at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, told Politico: “…the fact that one of the two men likely to be president next year is now a convicted felon sets up the possibility that those very same judicial institutions that guarantee the rule of law will come under the most ferocious political attack in our history. We can expect Trump to use the Republican Party for the remainder of the campaign to trash our judicial system. We can expect that most, if not all, Republican candidates will echo candidate Trump’s poisonous views about the fairness of the rule of law, creating national and local politics of a toxicity that we haven’t seen since the “stop the steal” campaign of 2020”.

Catherine J. Ross, professor of law emerita at the George Washington University Law School, told the same publication that she fears that “that the attacks on the New York verdict to date are merely precursors to further concerted efforts to erode the rule of law and the institutions on which democracy relies.”

We’ve been here before of course, as Naftali noted, following the 2020 election. Then, as now, Republicans recklessly parroted a lie that they knew to be false in an effort to undermine elections and, by extension, the very notion of representative democracy. Now, they’re hanging upside-down American flags and threatening to dispense with the separation of powers as they seek to meddle with the verdict in Manhattan. Ever fond of calling Democrats “un-American”, the GOP is now on a national-rage tour, railing against the very things that make America what it is. And it’s disgusting, if not surprising.

They hitched their wagon to a cult leader. No longer the self-appointed defenders of law and order, no longer the party of Lincoln - let’s just say, he would not be impressed. As he told an audience in January 1838: “I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.”