As I see it, the Trump team proposing a date of April 2026, makes them look really bad. They need 2 and a half years to mount a proper defense? It seems like they're doing this so he can play the victim card again.
BBM
”So he can play the victim card again.” I’ve been trying to figure out how to introduce this important article to the thread and you just gave it to me. Thank you!
I’ll provide a TL;DR summary of this lengtny article, but it's definitely worth reading to understand Trump and his base and why logic does not make a dent. IMO It’s because Trump’s appeal is about deeply held
feelings, and that makes him extremely powerful.
Summary: Essentially, Trump views himself as a victim and he has skillfully tapped into the angry victimhood of Americans who feel they have fallen behind economically and are the real victims of discrimination. His indictments are his latest victimhood and “they are coming after you.”
Quotes from the link:
Former President Donald Trump has solidified his lead in the GOP race by convincing most Republican voters to view his four criminal indictments as a politicized “witch hunt” aimed not only at him, but them.
Trump’s success in selling that argument to GOP voters has some immediate causes, key among them the choice by all of his leading competitors in the race, as well as most prominent voices in conservative media, to echo rather than challenge his contention. But the inclination of so many Republican voters to dismiss all of the charges accumulating against Trump also reflects something much more fundamental:
the hardening tendency of conservatives to believe that they are the real victims of bias in a society irreversibly growing more racially and culturally diverse.
BBM
From the outset of Trump’s political career, he has channeled that sentiment into his seemingly unbreakable bond with his core supporters. Now, Trump has transformed his multiple indictments – particularly from Black prosecutors he has repeatedly called “racist” – into just the latest proof point for the widespread belief within the GOP base that the biggest victims of discrimination are the groups most of them belong to: Christians, men and Whites.
“Victimhood is embedded in every part of Trump’s campaign, personality, communications, and strategy,” says Tresa Undem, a pollster for progressive causes. “The only thing that shifts is the topic and the object of blame.”
BBM
The choice by
most GOP leaders and voters alike to rally around Trump amid 91 felony charges underscores again how much protection that sense of victimhood provides him against behavior previously considered fatal for any political leader. But, as this week’s debate will almost certainly demonstrate, it also shows that Trump’s belligerent approach toward all the forces he says are threatening conservatives – from the “deep state” to the media and entertainment industry, to protesters in the Black Lives Matter and #metoo movements – will remain central to the GOP message, whether he stays the party’s principal figure or not.
The broad rejection of the charges against Trump within the GOP base marks a milestone not only in its personal allegiance to him, but also in those voters’ systemic alienation from the major institutions in American life. In the Republican coalition, it is a moment that has culminated decades of change – and one that points to years of turbulence ahead.
<snip>
And he has said that those investigating him are really attempting to silence and sublimate his supporters: “They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way,” he’s frequently asserted.
In that way, Undem and others see Trump’s response to the indictments as merely extending the arguments that have proven so compelling to his supporters from the outset of his career.
Trump’s portrayal of conservatives as the real victims of bias “is intoxicating for his base,” she says. “Issues that have arisen in the past seven years related to race and gender (George Floyd, #MeToo) are very uncomfortable. People don’t like to feel discomfort. They don’t like feeling blamed or at fault. Trump cures those feelings. He’s the magician who makes their discomfort disappear and then gives them something to be angry and righteous about, which makes them feel superior. It’s not their fault, it’s someone else’s.”
<snip>
The widespread dismissal of Trump’s indictments, like the preponderant Republican agreement with his discredited claims of fraud in 2020 and the growing tendency of GOP partisans to defend the January 6 riot as legitimate protest, makes clear just how many conservative voters consider themselves under siege in a changing America. When Trump and other elected GOP officials assert that he cannot receive a fair trial in any jurisdiction that mostly votes Democratic, they are expressing what might be called a form of “soft secession” – the conviction that all the institutions tied to blue America are so hostile and malevolent that conservatives must fundamentally deny their legitimacy.
BBM
www.newsweek.com
www.yahoo.com
www.theguardian.com
www.politico.com
