If there’s one thing Republicans hate, it’s crime.
Take their closing message in the 2022 midterms, handily summed up by this video of New York gubernatorial challenger Lee Zeldin’s fans furiously chanting “Crime! Crime! Crime!” in an apparent effort to reverse-Beetlejuice crime away.
Someone should really do something about all this crime, they demand, but not the Democrats, because Dems, as the RNC put it, simply “love crime and there’s no denying it.”
While Republicans profess to instead love law and order, it’s become increasingly unclear whether they understand how law and order even works. Judging from their steadfast defense of Donald Trump and the more luxury vacation-attracting SCOTUS justices, they seem to think bending or breaking laws is only wrong when a Democrat is rumored to have done so. Whenever any of their own are in legal jeopardy, they cloak themselves in a fog of willful ignorance and contradictions, where ideas about law and order get a lot more loosey-goosey.
Three years ago, in response to the social unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder, Trump branded himself “your president of law and order.” Cut to 2023 and the law-and-order president now finds himself facing two indictments, one of them criminal. How did sitting GOP politicians—who, it bears repeating, can’t stand crime—react to this news? By disputing the charges, sputtering rote whataboutism, and, in at least one instance, outright declaring war.
Right-wing media responded with even more spirited wagon-circling. If it sounded familiar when Fox News’ Jesse Watters said of Trump’s classified-documents indictment, “We’re talking about a piece of paper,” that’s because Watters almost identically downplayed Trump’s hush-money charges two months earlier, asking on-air, “Did Democrats just indict a former president over sex?” Why stop there, in reducing crimes to their component parts? Who’s to say Jeffrey Dahmer’s cannibalistic murder spree wasn’t just his “aggressive food-prep era.” (It all depends on how Dahmer voted.)
In any case, the push by Trump’s high-placed defenders has worked as intended. A CBS News/YouGov poll published on June 11 found that 61 percent of polled Republican voters said the indictment did not change their view of Trump, while 80 percent said he should still be able to assume office in 2025 even if he’s convicted. The Olympic-level mental and moral gymnastics required to stick that landing are astonishing. Or they would be if the last six years hadn’t just happened.
Trump has long been known by those tethered to reality as a fraud—just objectively, empirically a fraudulent person. He kicked off his presidency by settling a $25 million class-action lawsuit over his sham university and spent the remainder of it engulfed in Pigpen-like stink-lines of corruption, with more than a dozen of his close associates arrested, indicted, or jailed in that time. None of this flagrant fraudulence managed to tarnish his standing within the crime-hating party that propped him up, nor did an insurrection attempt in his honor, during which several presumably crime-hating cops were brutally attacked.
While Trump was still in office, his defenders at least had the fig leaf of the Justice Department policy that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted. Any evidence of alleged criminality was years away from potentially seeing the inside of a courtroom, so it was easier to dismiss at the time. What’s different now is that the chickens of Trump’s legal exposure have finally come home to roost, in the form of at least four separate investigations that have already dredged up reams of incriminating evidence, and yet his defenders are still rooting for him to coast through it all on sheer vibes, like a midair Wile E. Coyote refusing to look down.
Instead, they look straight ahead, toward the same persecution narrative that colored Trump’s entire presidency. The many serious charges he now faces amount, in their eyes, to a political hit job by unscrupulous actors with a raging vendetta. “If they can do it to him, they can do it to you,” the defenders say, as though keeping top secret documents and obstructing their return is something that happened to Trump, and could possibly happen to any of the patriotic car dealership-owning civilians who support him. As too many conservatives have it, crime is something only bad people do and good people get falsely accused of by crusading haters.
They refuse to engage with the substance of the issue in favor of partisan optics. Why bother sifting through so much damning evidence when “wannabe dictator has his rival arrested” is right there, waiting to confirm one’s priors? They whine about the politics of it all, even as the Biden administration bends over backwards to avoid conflicts of interest. They focus on the unprecedented nature of the moment, as though Barack Obama only walks free because of Trump’s benevolence, rather than the fact that his wildly imperfect presidency involved no prosecutable crimes. And at the same time, they’ve conveniently forgotten how hard Trump pushed for investigations into Obama, all of which turned up goose eggs, and that he made the future jailing of political rival Hillary Clinton a campaign slogan and promise.
Even after leaked audio last week revealed Trump gleefully showering Mar-a-Lago guests with classified documents, folks like Sean Hannity tripped over themselves to give him the benefit of the doubt. Where was even a fraction of that ludicrous generosity during the fruitless Benghazi hearings? Where was it during the transparently political investigation into Biden’s alleged corruption? Where is it right now, as Hunter Biden is charged—by a Trump-appointed prosecutor—for the crimes he actually committed, rather than the smorgasbord of villainy in the right’s collective fever dream? And where is it when hundreds of people who aren’t connected to the presidency are wrongfully convicted every year? The outrage over persecution only ever flows in one direction.
As much as the media loves a both-sides narrative, there is no photo negative for this kind of shoot-a-guy-on-Fifth-Avenue loyalty. Democrats are too yoked to at least the appearance of rule-following to ever stand behind someone who comes across as dead-to-rights guilty as Trump. Anyone who suggests prominent Dems would vow armed resistance on Biden’s behalf if he were caught on tape admitting to a crime he was accused of is not being honest with themselves.
Consider how both parties handled simultaneous sex scandals in late 2017, at the white-hot epicenter of the #MeToo movement. The Dems reluctantly cut Al Franken loose, despite the glaring ambiguities in the charges leveled against him, while the GOP fell in line behind Trump’s endorsement of U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, which Trump reiterated after it came out that Moore was an accused child molester who was reportedly banned from a mall for preying on underage girls. Alabama voters thankfully ended up going another way, but that nail-biter election just goes to show what the crime-hating rank and file are willing to put up with.
What would it take for the GOP to not fall in line behind Trump now, as the walls finally, maybe close in on him? Probably nothing. But if that’s the case, there’s a distinct possibility they’ll have a convicted felon as their candidate in 2024—an outcome that would be criminally appropriate.
