Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – Donald Trump is in a raging fury about a decision that didn’t go his way.
So Trump casts himself as the victim of a rigged system while rallying Republican leaders to literally rig the system after the fact, to derail the decision, to appease his acrimony. Along the way, Trump ramps up violent rhetoric. But the Republicans remain in lockstep behind him, even as serious strife looms ahead.
Sounds like the 2020 election result and the Capitol riot that followed, right?
But now it’s Trump’s 2024 criminal conviction in New York, where a jury of his peers last week found him guilty of 34 felonies.
Trump has only one playbook. We’ve seen the calamity that he created after he lost in 2020. We saw Republicans denounce him for the violence and mayhem of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection before they came crawling back to him.
And now Trump and his Republican allies are running the same plays. The latest U.S. House speaker, who tried to disenfranchise millions of voters in an attempt to help Trump overturn the 2020 election, now wants a valid jury verdict thrown out. And Trump is priming his supporters for future violence.