New York: Legally, the most important words that former President Donald Trump said last week after being indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on 34 felony counts were not guilty. But, politically, the most important may be election interference.
Trump’s repetition of those words, which have been picked up by other top Republicans, shows how he is trying to turn his historical position as the first former president accused of crimes to his advantage. This is another example of what has been a consistent denial throughout his political career – claiming without evidence that the election is being rigged against him.
After his initial court appearance in the New York case, the first of many in which he is in legal trouble, Trump faced various investigations and branded them as larger attempts to interfere in the 2024 election.
Appearing before supporters at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, Trump said, “Our justice system has become lawless.”
Trump has made some version of those claims in at least 20 social media posts since March 3, most of which have occurred over the past two weeks, when a Manhattan grand jury appeared to wrap up its work and indict the former president. Prepared to install. , Trump announced his latest bid for the White House shortly after the November midterms in what some in his orbit see as an effort to fend off the various investigations swirling around him.
Alleging the election, despite having no evidence to support his claims, is a regular Trump tactic. While competing for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, Trump claimed that his loss in the Iowa caucuses was due to fraud. When he won the White House that November but lost the popular vote, Trump claimed that the only reason he fell short in the latter category was because undocumented immigrants voted. A task force he set up to investigate voter fraud found no evidence to support his claim.
In 2020, months before polling began, Trump began arguing that the election would be fraudulent. He attacked efforts to loosen restrictions on mail voting during the coronavirus pandemic, and expanded on those charges after losing the election, claiming that he would actually win it. Those lies led to the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Federal and state election officials and Trump’s own attorney general have said there is no credible evidence that the 2020 election was tainted. The former president’s allegations of fraud were also completely rejected by the courts, including judges appointed by Trump. Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky said Trump is behaving like a politician in the legal crosshairs.
Levitsky said he certainly isn’t the first politician to be prosecuted for playing the political victim card — sometimes fairly, sometimes not.
Levitsky, who wrote the book How Democracies Die, said that when several former presidents of other countries were prosecuted, he claimed it was a conspiracy to sabotage their future elections. Most recently, there was a complaint from former Brazilian President Luís Início Lula da Silva after he was jailed ahead of the 2018 election. Silva was freed by his country’s Supreme Court and won back the presidency in October.
What is notable in Trump’s case, however, is that his own party is echoing the stolen election claims ahead of the next campaign. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said last month that he is directing his party’s committee chairs to investigate whether federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated lawsuits. being done.
Levitsky said that an entire party is toying with this line is somewhat unusual.
Last week’s charges in a New York court stemmed from Trump’s reimbursement of hush money paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, who he alleged was having an affair. . Even some of Trump’s critics see the charges as an extension of New York’s laws.
The heart of the Manhattan case is prosecutors’ claim that Trump falsified business records at his company in order to pay him to keep quiet a potentially damaging story during the election campaign – an illegal effort by Trump, they argued, to influence Election to try to do.
The former president also faces legal trouble from other investigations, two of which relate to his efforts to interfere in the 2020 election.
Prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, are investigating Trump’s January 2021 call to the state’s top elections official to find enough votes to declare Trump the winner. The US Justice Department has also launched a federal special counsel investigation into efforts to reverse Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Trump is also embroiled in a federal special counsel investigation into his handling of classified documents found at his Florida estate. Asked at a news conference on Tuesday whether the timing of the case was political, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg responded by saying: I bring up cases when they’re ready.
Bragg’s office declined to comment on Trump’s statements about election interference,” as did the Justice Department.
Critics warn that Trump is once again sewing up suspicions of fraud that could harm democracy. We’ve seen this movie before, Joanna Lydgate, chief executive of States United Action, which tracks politicians who embrace Trump’s election lies, said in a statement. We know it is dangerous because we all saw what happened on 6th January.
Trump has routinely dismissed such warnings, and has seamlessly integrated his current legal threat into three years of false allegations about Democratic Party wrongdoing.
At his first campaign rally in Waco, Texas, days before the Manhattan impeachment, Trump railed against all probes, saying his opponents were using probes because it was harder for them to fill ballot boxes, of which he did. Was.
The new weapon the out-of-control Democrats are using to cheat in the election is a criminal investigation of a candidate, he said.
Trump and other Republicans have sometimes contradicted themselves, condemning the investigation as an attempt to tarnish Trump while also predicting that they would aid his bid for the White House.
I think you’ll see his poll numbers go up, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R.N.Y., one of the president’s most vocal supporters in the House, predicted at a GOP convention last month. He has never been in a strong position. He condemned the allegations last week as unprecedented election interference.
Aaron Sherb, senior director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, which has long been critical of Trump’s allegations of rigging the election, said all investigations of the former president began before he ran for president again.
Scherb said that no one is above the law, including former presidents, and that running for president cannot and should not serve as a shield for misconduct.