It was nearly two weeks ago when Donald Trump published a prediction: The former president said he expected to be indicted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office on Tuesday, March 21. As a New York Times report noted soon after, the message was effectively “a starter’s gun for Republican officials,” and many dutifully raced to tout their support.
Prominent GOP officials ran even faster after Team Trump made clear that it was keeping score, paying careful attention to who was scrambling to defend the former president and who wasn’t.
After yesterday’s indictment, Republicans who responded to Trump’s starter’s gun two weeks ago began their second lap. The Times summarized:
Republican leaders in Congress lamented the moment as a sad day in the annals of United States history. Conservative news outlets issued a call to action for the party’s base. One prominent supporter of Donald J. Trump suggested that the former president’s mug shot should double as a 2024 campaign poster.
There’s no real point in quoting the dozens of GOP voices who spoke out, most of whom expressed their outrage in similar ways. There were plenty of tiresome references to a certain Hungarian-American philanthropist — despite the fact that George Soros has never even met Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and it wouldn’t much matter if they had met — and crime rates in New York, despite the fact that crime in Manhattan has actually gone down since Bragg took office.
But a written statement from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who famously said he’d “had it with this guy“ in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot, only to kiss Trump’s ring at Mar-a-Lago soon after — stood out as notable. From the California Republican’s tweet, published soon after the indictment was made public:
“Alvin Bragg has irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our Presidential election. As he routinely frees violent criminals to terrorize the public, he weaponized…
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