GOP pols at Trump trial are faithful suitors showing fealty to a gilded defendant
From left, Rep. Byron Donalds, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, House Speaker Mike Johnson, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy and Rep. Cory Mills look on as former President Donald Trump talks to the media outside Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday. Credit: AP/Curtis Means
How exactly do you characterize that little red carpet — or silver barricade — line that formed outside Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday behind ex-New Yorker and current criminal defendant Donald Trump?
The public got to see a gaggle of ambitious out-of-town Republicans, several posed in Trumpian red ties, showing visual and verbal fealty to their national party’s closest approximation of a monarch.
Was this an office-seeker’s soup line? Vivek Ramaswamy might not be in the scrum for vice president but maybe he can get something out of a possible next Trump White House for his surrender from the GOP primary. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who also gave up the presidential ghost, also stood behind Trump. So did Florida Reps. Cory Mills and Byron Donalds. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) made a surprise appearance at the courthouse.
As president, Trump was known to watch the Fox network to see potential appointees “audition” for his attention. So the adherents stand to gain from hailing him in public. Remember — he used to complain about how John Bolton’s mustache looked on TV before ultimately taking him on as national security adviser.
Or was the gathering a kiss-the-ring thank-you session that would benefit its star guest, House Speaker Mike Johnson? Just last week, Trump adorer Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene moved to have Johnson ousted as speaker. But the MAGA king of Mar-a-Lago didn’t buy into it. Had Trump supported Greene, you can be sure she wouldn’t have been soundly booed and rejected by fellow majority Republicans on the House floor.
Was this just a pity party to soothe Trump’s hurt feelings? His son Eric Trump has been on hand, but wife Melania and daughter Ivanka have not. This is, after all, a trial that involves alleged fraud stemming from his dalliances while married and the use of his money to squelch the story about Stormy Daniels. One can understand why they’d stay away under any circumstances.
Was this a convention held two months before the real GOP convention? You can bet that at least several of those who showed up at his side would not have done so if he had been trailing badly in the polls. Rather, Trump polls ahead of President Joe Biden in several key states. And most of them attended a top-dollar fundraiser in Manhattan for Trump later in the day.
Those hoping for a return on Trump’s loyalty should be careful what they ask for. Does anyone want to become the next Michael Cohen, the former “fixer” making news in the courtroom this week? He was a longtime Trump loyalist who moved the necessary hush money to Daniels in 2016 when the campaign reached a difficult juncture. Cohen was caught carrying out transgressions of his own, and flipped.
“I regret doing things for him that I should not have,” Cohen testified in the trial this week. “Lying. Bullying people to effectuate a goal. I don't regret working for the Trump Organization. As I expressed before, I had some very interesting, great times.”
Parroting the false martyrdom that keeps Trump politically viable seems like an initiation rite. Johnson, of Louisiana, managed to sidestep an obvious lie by interpreting the current trial as “election interference,” yet he also unconvincingly called all the cases against the 45th president “a borderline criminal conspiracy.”
That kind of slippery cant should keep Johnson in the fold — unless or until the boss, if elected again, tires of him and shoves him out the door.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.