Thursday night was the most cringe moment in American politics since the high times of the #resistance in the early Trump administration. After news broke that Donald Trump had become the first president in US history to be charged with a crime, there were labored, overwrought historical analogies (the number of times Fox News personalities mentioned that the Rubicon had been crossed would have allowed Caesar’s entire legion to go back and forth across the ancient Roman river a dozen times). There was ample partisan wish-casting, as right-wingers shared their fantasies of President Joe Biden condemning the prosecution of Trump in New York in order to bring our country together. And, of course, there were dark anxieties that this would spell the end of American democracy and represented what Donald Trump Jr. simply called “Communist level shit.”
These takes united the Republican Party — figures from Trump-cautious politicians like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) to ardent MAGA die-hards like Reps. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) joined in condemning the indictment of Trump by a Manhattan grand jury, which is reportedly over allegations that he had illegally covered up hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 presidential election (although the indictment has still not been released). Among Republicans, there was a consensus that this prosecution was entirely political and a threat to the rule of law. Youngkin insisted on Twitter that “Arresting a presidential candidate on a manufactured basis should not happen in America,” while Gosar called the indictment “a clear and brazen political persecution.”
The question is whether that consensus will also apply to whether Trump should be the Republican nominee for president. In the short term, there was no doubt that the indictment will offer a surge of momentum to Trump’s presidential campaign — his rivals almost uniformly came out…
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