I don’t envy those who feel the need to defend Donald Trump in the wake of his latest criminal indictment. As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall noted on Saturday, “[T]he main takeaway from the indictment is that there’s basically no defense against these charges.”
That strikes me as more than fair. The former president and his partisan allies aren’t about to say, “Well, game over, the next obvious step is incarceration,” and they’re going to have to come up with something to say, but each of the pro-Trump talking points suffer from the same problem:
They fall apart quickly under routine scrutiny.
1. Hillary Clinton did the same thing, and she wasn’t charged. The problem with this argument, touted by a great many Republicans including Sen. Lindsey Graham, is that Hillary Clinton did not, in reality, do the same thing.
2. Joe Biden did the same thing, and he wasn’t charged. This, too, is popular with GOP leaders, though it’s also completely wrong.
3. Barack Obama did the same thing, and he wasn’t charged. This is so absurd that even former Attorney General Bill Barr characterized it yesterday as a “big lie.”
4. Incumbent presidents shouldn’t indict their predecessors and rivals. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy pushed this line, arguing, “It is unconscionable for a president to indict the leading candidate opposing him.” But Biden didn’t indict Trump; an independent special counsel and a grand jury did. That’s not the same thing.
5. Indicting Trump jeopardizes the rule of law. This argument, which Sen. Josh Hawley pushed on Fox News late last week, is especially odd. To hear the Missouri Republican tell it, the way to preserve the rule of law is to have prosecutors look the other way in response to evidence of a private citizen’s multiple felonies. Not to put too fine a point on this, but that’s bonkers.
6. Former presidents are only charged with crimes in authoritarian, third-world countries. Reality proves otherwise.
7. Prosecuting Trump might be “disruptive.” This line, endorsed by the House speaker on Fox News, is at odds with the very idea of a stable system of justice. In countries that take the rule of law seriously, prosecutorial decisions are not made on the basis of which cases might be distracting.
8. Law enforcement has been “weaponized.” This talking point has been uttered by more Republicans than I could possibly count — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was among its early champions last week — but there’s no credible evidence of the Justice Department being weaponized since Trump left office.
9. The Presidential Records Act empowered Trump to do what he did. Nope, it did not. In fact, officials at the National Archives published a thorough takedown of this claim on Friday, setting the record straight.
10. Trump declassified the classified documents. It was House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan peddling this line on CNN yesterday, which was weird because the indictment itself features a direct quote in which Trump himself debunked the claim.
11. Maybe the FBI “planted” the incriminating evidence? Believe it or not, the former president re-embraced this line on Friday night, writing to his social media platform, “When the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, they wouldn’t let my lawyers or representatives anywhere near them. They wouldn’t tell us what they took. Knowing them, and based on past performance, they probably later “stuffed” in other documents.” The fact remains, however, that Trump has peddled this claim many times, but when given an opportunity to make the argument in court, he and his lawyers have avoided it, knowing how absurd it is.
I’m open to the possibility that, at some point, either the former president or one of his allies will come up with something persuasive. But that clearly hasn’t happened yet.