Donald Trump is a convicted felon. He has also been found civilly liable for sexual abuse. After that trial, during which he repeatedly called his accuser, E. Jean Carroll, a liar, Carroll sued for defamation and won a $83.3 million judgment against him.
The former president is still facing dozens of felonies from three indictments including for his alleged withholding and mishandling of highly classified documents when he left the White House; election interference in Georgia after the 2020 presidential election; and conspiracy to defraud the United States after he lost his reelection bid to Joe Biden nearly four years ago.
Tens of millions of your fellow Americans — some of them friends, relatives, co-workers, and neighbors — don’t care. They’re going to vote for him anyway.
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This is overwhelmingly true if those people are Republicans, a group that has largely abandoned the rule of law only when it applies to Trump. When 147 Republicans in the House and Senate voted against certifying Biden’s historic win in the 2020 presidential election, that was an irreparable rupture in this nation’s foundation. And it’s only gotten worse. Every Republican toadying up to Trump to be his 2024 running mate has offered some version of the same damning qualifier: They will accept November’s results if it is a “free and fair” election.
The inference, of course, is that 2020 wasn’t, which is a Trump-manufactured lie that he’s still spewing. For many Republicans, including those who want to be vice president, the only free and fair election is one that Trump wins.
Every time Trump garners another ignoble first — first president to be twice impeached, first former president to be indicted, first former president to be convicted in a criminal case — there’s a kind of collective breath-holding to wait and see if just maybe, this will be the moment when a significant number of Trump’s followers say “Enough.”
But that has yet to happen and probably won’t. If anything, when Trump faces any measure of accountability, like being found guilty on 34 felony counts last week for falsifying business records to help his 2016 presidential campaign, his followers seem bound even closer to him. His campaign claims Trump got $53 million in donations in the 24 hours after his “hush-money” case conviction.
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A recent episode of “The Daily Show” aired excerpts from 2023 interviews with Trump followers by The Young Turks news program. Echoing an infamous Trump comment, a man made this shocking statement: Trump “could stand on the front steps of the White House and commit murder, and I’m with him.”
During a 2016 campaign stop, Trump crowed about the loyalty of those he called “my people.” He said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s incredible.”
More than incredible, it’s incredibly disturbing how many people are willing to elect a lawless president. When he won the presidency in 2016, Trump got 63 million votes. More than 11 million voters who witnessed the chaos, cruelties, and lies of Trump’s White House years decided, “Yup, I want some of that, too,” and he got 74 million votes in 2020 in a losing effort. There’s no reason to think he won’t top his 2020 total in November.
If Trump’s attempts to upend the peaceful transfer of power, including inciting a deadly insurrection and bringing this nation to the brink of its worst constitutional crisis ever, haven’t eroded his grasp on the Republican Party, it’s hard to believe anything ever will.
In the 1970s, cult leader Jim Jones convinced his followers that a paradise in the jungles of Guyana awaited them in a place he called Jonestown. But once they arrived, he took their passports to prevent them from leaving. His followers became his hostages.
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That’s not the case with Trump’s minions. They could walk away from Trump at any time. Nothing is holding them except their belief that he is the only man who will keep America white; continue to erode women’s reproductive and health care autonomy; keep Black and brown people in their place and preferably outside this nation’s borders; and push LGBTQ people out of the streets and back into closets.
In The Young Turks interview, a Trump follower said, “If [Trump] says it, then I’ll go with it. If he wants to be a dictator, then so be it.” While the Supreme Court is slow-walking its decision on whether a president has total immunity from criminal prosecution, his followers have already decided that whatever Trump wants, Trump should get.
This is the part where someone will say Trump’s followers shouldn’t be shamed or criticized for their continued support of the former president. But the fault never lies with the demagogues alone. It also lies with their followers who elevate them to power, keep them relevant, and do their terrible bidding.
Without his millions of followers, Trump is nothing more than a lousy businessman and a one-and-done former president. But with them, he could be months away from perhaps the most disreputable first of all — the first convicted felon elected to the White House.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @reneeygraham.
