Monday, March 20, 2023

TRUMP'S IMMINENT ARREST UNITES PRO- AND ANTI-TRUMP REPUBLICANS ... AGAINST DEMOCRATS

Donald Trump says he'll be arrested tomorrow. Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire -- a Trump critic who was recently compared to John McCain in a Politico story, which referred to him as "Washington's favorite Republican" -- knows who the real enemy is: the Democrats.
“I think it’s building a lot of sympathy for the former president,” Sununu said of the possible arrest on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The governor said some Republicans he’d talked to who aren’t “big Trump supporters” expressed concern that the former president “was being attacked.”

“I just think that not just the media, but really, a lot of the Democrats have misplayed this in terms of building sympathy for the former president and it does drastically change the paradigm as we go into the ‘24 election,” Sununu said.
Mike Pence, who wants to run against Trump and who recently criticized him (behind closed doors), for which he's also receiving warm press coverage and comparisons to McCain, agrees with Sununu that the Democrats are the bad guys:
"I'm taken aback at the idea of indicting a former President of the United States, at a time when there's a crime wave in New York City, that -- the fact that the Manhattan DA thinks that indicting President Trump is his top priority, I think is, just tells you everything you need to know about the radical left in this country," Pence told [ABC's Jonathan] Karl.

"It just feels like a politically charged prosecution here. And I, for my part, I just feel like it's just not what the American people want to see."
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump loyalist, agrees:


As do these folks:




At Popular Information, Judd Legum writes this about Trump's decision to announce his imminent arrest:
The strategy, it appears, is to drown out any discussion of his actual conduct by skipping right to the outrage about his arrest — even though Trump has not yet been arrested or charged. This approach involves convincing the public that his actions were unimportant and, therefore, any charges will be politically motivated.
Whether it's Trump's strategy or not, this approach also involves shifting attention to a different enemy: DA Bragg, along with the Democratic Party and the "radical leftists" who belong to it. It's the same approach we saw after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision was leaked: The real crisis, we were told, was not that the Supreme Court was about to take away a widely supported right that Americans had counted on for nearly half a century. It was that a liberal leaker -- Republicans assumed we'd all believe the leaker was a liberal -- had put a private document on public view and had thus endangered Supreme Court justices (or at least the Republican ones).

Republicans are good at this because they spend all their waking hours constructing and reinforcing narratives of Democratic perfidy. It's easy to fit any new event into these tales of evil.

Democrats just do stuff, and hope it will be well received based on the facts. Democrats' response to Republican narratives is usually to hope they'll simply go away on their own.

I understand that quite a few Democrats think this is the weakest of the many cases against Trump. But it wouldn't hurt to defend what Bragg is doing. The attacks won't stop.

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