A truism of the Trump era is that every accusation is a confession: When Donald Trump hurls outlandish accusations at his opponents, he is hinting at what he intends to do to them, justifying the violation of laws and norms in advance by positioning himself as the victim of his own upcoming misdeeds.
That’s how we should understand Trump’s rant after he was convicted last week on 34 felony counts. After his conviction, he told reporters gathered outside the courthouse, “This is something the Biden administration did to hurt and torment its opponents.” Fact-checking such claims is tedious work — the MAGA movement doesn’t care what’s true and what’s false — but President Biden has nothing to do with the state lawsuit brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. And as if to underscore Biden’s refusal to interfere in the Justice Department’s decisions, a federal prosecution begins this week against the president’s son, Hunter Biden. By promoting this fantasy about Biden, Trump is suggesting that if he returns to the White House, he will try to use the Justice Department in exactly the same way he pretends it was used against him. When the former president compares himself to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison earlier this year, he is giving himself permission to act like Vladimir Putin.
In his first interview since his conviction, with three Fox News hosts on Sunday, Trump all but promised that his second term would be even more corrupt and vengeful than his first. By his own account, Trump never called for Hillary Clinton to be jailed and has generously resisted entreaties from others to punish her. He suggested he might not be so gentle next time. “Everybody was always saying put her in jail, and I could have done that, but I thought it would be awful,” he said. “And now that this has happened to me, I might feel differently about it.”
Speaking to the Fox hosts, Trump denied saying the words he repeatedly used during his first campaign for president: “I never said, ‘Put her in jail.'” Of course, this is a huge lie, the kind that shows Trump’s powerful ability to get his supporters to accept the absurd. And it’s important to remember that “put her in jail” was never just rhetoric. As the Mueller report revealed, Trump demanded that Jeff Sessions, the first attorney general who resigned from his position in an investigation into the 2016 campaign, pursue Clinton. “According to Mr. Sessions, the president asked him to withdraw his resignation so that he could direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton,” the Mueller report said. Finally, in an attempt to appease his boss, Sessions asked Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber to investigate right-wing allegations about the Clinton Foundation, but Huber got nothing.
