“Do you accept the verdict of the New York jury that found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts?”
That will be the question asked of every Republican from now until the presidential election in November, and if Republicans don’t know how to answer, they will look like idiots, which is exactly what the left-leaning media wants.
You can’t just say yes because the implied premise of the question is that the verdict was fair, and that could not be further from the truth. But you can’t just say no either, because the verdict is a fact, just like the O.J. verdict. It exists, and it has to be explained.
Of course, what the media inquisitors will try to do is paint Trump supporters into a corner. If you say you don’t support the verdict, you will be “justice deniers,” in the term smartly coined by talk-show host Dan Bongino last week. But Republicans can’t let that be the final word.
They have to explain that when you say you are accepting the verdict, it just means you are accepting that the verdict was the inevitable result of a corrupt New York legal system. Anyone who represents Trump or the MAGA movement has to be fully in command of the facts and be prepared to explain them. Start with the assignment of Judge Juan Merchan to the case and ask why this is the third Trump-related case he has been assigned to. Talk about the judge’s refusal to recuse himself despite his status as a Joe Biden donor and his daughter’s status as a multi-million dollar fund-raiser for Democrats.
Then demand answers for the multiple reversible errors Merchan committed in creating the court record – the salacious and irrelevant testimony of porn star Stormy Daniels, the refusal to allow Trump to present an expert witness who could explain federal election law to the jury and why Trump didn’t violate it. How about the unconstitutional decision to withhold from Trump and his attorneys the exact nature of the underlying crime, which turned misdemeanor charges into felonies, and Merchan’s claim that the jury did not even have to be unanimous in identifying such an underlying crime?
Of course, CNN, MSNBC, and the Sunday morning news shows won’t raise any of those troubling issues, so when a Trump supporter tries to explain the difference between a fair trial and a show trial, they will be shouted down by their interviewers.
This is not a new playbook. We’ve been watching the same kind of “gotcha” journalism for months as Republicans have been grilled by reporters in an attempt to paint them as “election deniers.”
“Will you accept the election results of 2024 no matter what happens?”
That is the question NBC’s Kristen Welker posed to Sen. Marco Rubio during his recent appearance on “Meet the Press,” but it is nearly identical to the question being asked to every supporter of Donald Trump for the past year.