I am so tired of watching Republicans defend Trump’s assault on our constitution and our democracy by pretending there’s nothing wrong with undermining the legitimacy of a legitimate election, demanding that a “too honest” Pence refuse to certify it and coming up with a fraudulent electors scheme to subvert the will of the voters – all of which is what Trump is accused of, much of which he did in public.
Donalds began with the phony-baloney “Trump was just exercising his First Amendment rights” excuse. He called Trump's third (and counting) indictment "a complete violation of an individual's First Amendment rights. You're allowed to speak about elections and the outcomes even if big media and the radical left don't like it, you're allowed to say it,” Donalds claimed.
As I wrote in a previous post, after Trump’s own lawyer spewed this same BS, the indictment very clearly states that Trump had every right to speak about, even lie about the 2020 election and to challenge its results. It’s what Trump actually did to subvert it that he was indicted for this time.
Wednesday night, Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, who did not rule out voting for Trump next year, demolished the “free speech” excuse. “All conspiracies involve speech. And all fraud involves speech, So, free speech doesn’t give you the right to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy," Barr said.
But the next day on Fox, Donalds all but said out loud that free speech makes Trump treason OK: “He's allowed to use all means possible, legally speaking, to try to find a way to fight the outcome,” Donalds declared. “He's allowed to do that. Nobody can take that away from you, especially some rogue knucklehead prosecutor out of the Department of Justice.”
Trump, like all defendants, is entitled to the presumption of innocence, unquestionably. But instead of saying something like, “I will respect the process and see where our legal procedures take us,” Donalds and his MAGA cronies attack our legal system for calling it a crime to plot to steal an election. So long as it’s a Republican, of course. We all know how fast the pitchforks and tiki torches would come out if Kamala Harris talked about refusing to certify a Trump win in 2025.
Donalds is not a lawyer but surely he knows or should know that the problem here is that Trump did not use legal means to undermine the election and our very democracy. The Congressman is either lying, shockingly stupid or both. I vote for the latter. What’s for sure is that he is not upholding his oath to “bear true faith and allegiance” to the constitution.
