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Republicans Are Revealing Their Own Weaknesses
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Republicans Are Revealing Their Own Weaknesses

Don’t let their fake anger fool you! It's more like bad poker face.

Brian Beutler's avatar
Brian Beutler
Jun 10, 2024
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(Photo by Justin Lane - Pool/Getty Images)

Republicans met Donald Trump’s felony convictions with spasms of staged outrage. It’s not that the convictions didn’t genuinely upset them, but their anger wasn’t rooted in any sincere sense of injustice. They were mad that the law demonstrated its primacy over them, in a way that carried political consequences, too. 

They have thus taken aim at the few remaining Republican officeholders and office-seekers who aren’t fully complicit in Trump’s criminality, and have threatened to harm the country unless the convictions are somehow erased. 

For the crime of tweeting, “I urge all Americans to respect the verdict and the legal process,” Maryland’s GOP Senate nominee Larry Hogan became a party pariah. Trump loyalist Chris LaCivita delivered the letter of excommunication: “You just ended your campaign.”

Several Republican senators have promised to cease all legislative cooperation. They have even threatened to boycott appropriations bills that don’t defund the police specifically for Trump—that is, to shut down the government unless Democrats agree to place Trump above the law. House Republicans have obliged by introducing amendments tailored to those demands.

These outbursts have all the trappings of a genuine tantrum, but we shouldn’t be fooled by the meaning of it. One of its chief purposes, beyond consolidating Republican support for Trump and limiting swing-vote defections, is to head-fake Democrats into believing Trump’s convictions are somehow bad news for them.

This has clearly worked on some of them. Famed Democratic strategist Paul Begala even advised Democrats to move on from Trump’s felony convictions: “I’m not very interested in Mr. Trump’s personal problems.”

Begala and others are letting themselves be duped. As Josh Marshall wrote just after the jury returned its verdict, “The intensity of the screaming is directly proportional to intensity of fear and danger they feel over what happened. To imagine otherwise is to fall for yet another Trump con.”

This is true vis-a-vis Trump’s New York felonies, but it’s also a good general lesson. When you apply it broadly, it becomes a handy tool for identifying what Republicans view as their true liabilities. 

NORMANDS AND INSTITUTIONS

Consider the Republican response to the remarks President Biden delivered in Normandy, commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day. 

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