Trump’s “Defenses” Aren’t Aimed at the Courtroom
Donald Trump loves to scream 'witch hunt!' and 'election interference!' as his indictments pile up, but these are defenses that are designed to sway public opinion.
Since the moment the first indictments dropped against ex-President Trump, he has been beating a consistent drum to try and sway public opinion against the inquiries and prosecutions—and to grift ever more money from his loyal followers.
On his social media platform Truth Social and in stump speeches ahead of the GOP primaries, Trump has made a number of claims rather consistently. It’s useful at this point to gather them together and assess their purpose and likely impact.
It’s also helpful to understand why these claims may be working with his base yet appear not to be convincing voters outside of it. Further, it’s important to understand why he continues to assert them, even though none of it is going to wind up mattering in court.
Witch hunt!
Trump seeks to characterize the various prosecutions and investigations as mere continuations of his earlier legal issues. Those included Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s two impeachments by Congress.
Unfortunately, as Trump loves to highlight, those efforts failed to result in any legal consequences for him. Trump now labels them as “hoaxes” to cast doubt upon all the current investigations as similarly baseless (e.g. the “boxes hoax”). To Trump and his followers, the investigations and indictments are all politically motivated “witch hunts.”
Trump even uses the phrase often to urge his base to text to donate to his campaign, which has now spent some $40 million on legal fees.
A “witch hunt” refers to a search for a crime or a criminal where none in fact exists. But in each of the charged or soon-to-be charged matters, there is strong and in some cases overwhelming evidence of criminal activity. For example, there was an actual recovery of over 100 classified and even top secret national security documents from Mar-a-Lago pursuant to a search warrant issued by a federal judge. That’s why the label “witch hunt” doesn’t stick well outside his base and conservative-leaning independents.
For many Republican voters, though, this creates strong cognitive dissonance. A Reuters poll last month, for example, found only 35 percent of the GOP respondents said it was “believable” that Trump illegally kept any classified documents, despite clear evidence of what the FBI recovered from the search. The remaining 65 percent appear ready to believe Trump’s lies over what their own eyes can see.
Election interference!
Trump frequently points out that the current indictments are coming two and a half years after he left office, well past the date he declared his intention to seek the nomination. To his followers, he claims this is blatant “election interference”—meaning that the Justice Department allegedly held its fire until Trump was leading in the polls.
This ignores the fact that Trump declared his presidential candidacy in November of 2022, long before any other candidates. He did this on precisely in order to get out ahead of any potential indictments, and so he could claim the Justice Department was acting with political motivation when it finally and inevitably did indict him.
This line of attack also ignores the fact that shortly after Trump announced he was running, Merrick Garland appointed a Special Counsel, Jack Smith, in order to wall the Justice Department off and allow an independent prosecutor to move forward. That is in fact what is supposed to happen in such a politicized situation, and you simply can’t get more independent than having a Special Counsel appointed. To argue that any indictment of a presidential candidate is off-limits leads to an absurd conclusion: that politicians can simply avoid investigation and charges simply by beginning to campaign.
That defies common sense, and it isn’t the law. Republicans surely wouldn’t ease upon on Hunter Biden, for example, if he suddenly decided he wanted to run for president.
Speaking of Hunter Biden…
Within the Fox and OAN information bubble, the legal troubles of the President’s son garner far more attention and time than the investigation and indictments of the former president. Trump exploits this information and reality gap by tying all major developments in his cases to what Republicans are most focused on: Hunter Biden.
The younger Biden has been investigated—by a Trump appointed prosecutor, no less—for more than five years. That prosecutor ultimately recommended a plea deal resulting in probation and no jail time. Were Hunter Biden not the president’s son, he probably would never have been charged at all based on the allegations in the plea deal.
But that doesn’t stop Trump from putting Hunter Biden on blast 24/7, claiming he got a sweetheart deal from a corrupt Justice Department.
In the MAGA mindset, everything in Washington, and in particular the White House, must come back to Hunter Biden, even though the charges are for nothing more than the non-payment of taxes and a false statement in obtaining a handgun. Perhaps they can’t imagine Trump not intervening in an investigation of his own family.
But contrary to the noise coming from the right, the White House simply doesn’t spend its time obsessing over the case, and the Justice Department doesn’t either.
Nor does one part of the Justice Department investigating the Hunter Biden case in Delaware coordinate in any way with an independent Special Counsel investigation into the former president. It’s extraordinary to suggest such a connection, and such a claim therefore requires extraordinary proof, but there has been none so far. The GOP trafficks so regularly now in conspiracy theories, however, that they can convince their base of nefarious string-pulling with little more than a “we’re just asking questions” segment on Fox.
Whaddabout Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton?
Another go-to of the former president is to harp on the notion that classified documents were mishandled by Joe Biden when he was Vice President and by Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, but they aren’t being prosecuted. (He also grossly and incorrectly characterizes what was found at Biden’s home and office.)
Trump further ignores the fact that his own vice president, Mike Pence, also had classified documents, and that there is in fact a special counsel investigating Joe Biden’s possession of such documents.
As far as Hillary Clinton goes, and Bill for good measure, Trump treads on some thin ice when he raises her alleged deletion of emails off a server.
Trump is suggesting that his efforts to delete video surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago servers, now charged as two counts of obstruction in his federal case in Miami, was not a crime because Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton were never charged.
The key difference, of course, is that whether it’s Biden, the Clintons, or Pence, none of these other officials tried either to retain documents after they inadvertently took them, nor did they attempt to cover anything up or keep the government from recovering them. Trump simply stands in a different light, and the trial will have a way of focusing and educating the public as to why.
None of these arguments will work in court
It’s important to recognize that none of the above arguments— politically motivated witch hunt, election interference, Hunter Biden distriction, Hillary’s emails—are ever going to see the light of day in court. They simply aren’t relevant to the charges leveled against him.
So why does Trump spend so much time publicly attacking the investigations and the prosecutions, even at high risk of making serious admissions against his own interest, if these aren’t going to be part of his actual defense?
For starters, Trump believes the only way out of his legal predicament is to win the election. And to do that, he has to win in the court of public opinion. If he can outrun the indictments (at least the federal ones) and pull off an election victory, he can make the federal charges go away, or so he believes.
Further, Trump knows that any potential jury, especially for his federal case in Miami, will draw from heavily red-state voter country. His efforts to portray the charges as a politically-driven witch hunt designed to deny him the presidency, while giving his political enemies a pass, might resonate strongly enough to infect the likely jury pool.
Finally, and this is less often acknowledged, Trump uses social media as a way to enforce and amplify the messaging he wants his underlings and allies in Congress to parrot. Farther down the chain, it also helps telegraph to would-be witnesses what story Trump wants them to tell if and when they speak to investigators or testify before the grand jury.
In short it’s all very modern-day mob boss in nature. Trump doesn’t really have very many good defenses that he can actually use in court successfully, just as we saw in the E. Jean Carroll case. The only way he can beat this is to win back the White House and use the powers of that office to drop the charges or even undo the convictions.
Voters need to see his missives, then, for what they are: a way to stand above the law, once again, and be unaccountable to anyone. The law will soon do its part to show Trump cannot succeed, but it’s up to us voters to do the rest.
I think that Trump's goals are twofold here. One is absolutely what you said it was--a political gambit. Horrifyingly, it has succeeded wildly, probably even beyond his own expectations. Second, I think that he's trying to intimidate any prosecutors and if he can't do that, he wants to incite his base to violence (again). He clearly won't intimidate Fani Willis or Jack Smith, so that leaves the "violence card" on the the table, and I fear for our country when one of his brainwashed supporters acts on their delusions.
Trump is a rat in a corner. He has nothing to lose by being as incendiary as possible. It is the only way he might avoid spending the rest of his life in jail. It doesn't matter one whit to him if he burns down the United States, the democratic world, and the world as a whole, as long as he escapes prison. And if by some chance he is reelected, he and his followers will do everything in their power to ensure that democracy dies in the United States for many, many years.