The historic nature of Trump’s criminal conviction is being leveraged by his campaign as a sort of roll-call vote to see which politicians will defend the former president and which of them will defend America’s legal system. It appears you can’t do both.
Larry Hogan, a moderate Republican who is running for an open Senate seat in liberal-leaning Maryland, took to social media to urge all Americans to “respect the verdict and the legal process”.
Within minutes, Chris LaCivita, a top official on Trump’s campaign, posted a crystal-clear reply to Mr Hogan: “You just ended your campaign.” The implication: if you’re not with us on this, you’re politically dead.
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Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson said that Thursday was “a shameful day in American history” and that Trump’s conviction was “a purely political exercise, not a legal one.” Steve Scalise, another top Republican in Congress, said that America’s legal system was operating like a banana republic. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis compared the process to a “kangaroo court”.
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"This is a quintessential show trial,” [Florida Senator Marco] Rubio said. “This is what you see in communist countries. This is what I grew up having people in the [Cuban exile] community tell me about. It happened in the days after the Castro revolution.”
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These types of defences align with Trump’s larger belief that many of his issues are not with individuals - whether they be voters or jurors. Instead, he feels that many of the bedrock structures of American government, like its electoral process and its judicial system, its media, its intelligence agencies, are fundamentally and unfairly rigged against him. It’s why, at his rallies, he calls for the “deep state” to be dismantled, to great cheers.
In Trump’s eyes, a claim that America’s legal system is functioning properly is a de facto critique of him - and to criticise him risks alienating both the former president and his sizable base of supporters within the party. It’s a step that many Republican officials are wary of taking.
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Earlier this month, an ABC News/IPSOS poll found that one fifth of Donald Trump's supporters said they would either reconsider or withdraw their support for him if he were convicted of a felony.
In an era when presidential elections are ultimately decided by a few thousand voters in a few swing states, it remains to be seen whether this guilty verdict will ultimately move that dial.