This past week, Donald Trump joined forces with two rap artists charged with conspiracy to commit murder. He promised to commute the sentence of a notorious internet drug dealer. And he appeared backstage with another rap artist who has pleaded guilty to assault for hitting a female fan.
As Trump awaits the conclusion of his trial in Manhattan — closing arguments are scheduled for Tuesday and a verdict could come as soon as this week — he took advantage of a weeklong break from the court to join suspects and convicts criminals who were indicted by the same system that indicted him. is at war.
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The performances fit neatly into Trump’s 2024 campaign, in which he has said he will likely pardon those prosecuted for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and lent his voice to a recording of the national anthem by a choir of January 1, 2021. 6 prisoners.
There was a time when so much confirmed and alleged criminality would have been too much to tolerate for the supporters of a candidate for president, an office with a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution. That may have been especially true in the case of a candidate who has been indicted four times and accused of gross disregard for the law.
But with less than six months until Election Day, Trump, who has long promoted “law and order” messages, is leaning toward an outlaw image, surrounding himself with accused criminals and convicts.
“I don’t think people appreciate the extent to which Trump has embraced the image of lawlessness in this campaign,” said Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist who worked for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign and was highly critical of Trump.
Miller described Trump’s recent guest appearances as “a vetting decision that would have been unthinkable in previous campaigns.”
Trump aides did not respond to an email seeking comment on the message he wanted to convey with these appearances.
Trump’s rally in the Bronx last week concluded with performances by two rappers, Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, whose real names are Michael Williams and Tegan Chambers. Both were charged in a conspiracy that prosecutors say led to 12 shootings in Brooklyn. Williams also faces two counts of attempted murder. Both men pleaded not guilty and are out on bail.
Trump presented the two men to the crowd from the rally stage for a brief commentary. Chambers kept his message short and sweet: “Make America great again.”
Two days later, addressing an unfriendly crowd at the Libertarian Party’s national convention in Washington, Trump vowed to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the black market website Silk Road, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015. At the same event, Trump had his photo taken with the rapper Afroman, whose real name is Joseph Edgar Foreman and who pleaded guilty in 2015 to hitting a woman who attended one of his concerts.
In the courtroom, Trump has surrounded himself with allies-turned-defendants. The week that his former fixer, Michael Cohen, was scheduled to testify that Trump had approved a scheme to pay off a porn actor and cover it up, Trump marched into court accompanied by his top indicted legal adviser, Boris Epshteyn, who attended every meeting. day of trial since his own indictment was filed in an election interference case in Arizona.
Also in Trump’s entourage during Cohen’s testimony were Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who spent time in prison on fraud charges and whom Trump pardoned, and Chuck Zito, a former actor who spent years spent time in federal prison and was a leader of a Hells Angels chapter in New York.
Trump has insisted that any investigation into him is political, the work of adversaries plotting against him. He has tarred several representatives of the justice system — political candidates who aggressively campaigned against him and prosecutors appointed to investigate him — with the same brush, while backing his most controversial supporters.
This Trump reflex – ignoring accusations if the accused is useful to him – is not new. But the scale has changed.
In his 2016 campaign, Trump placed Elliott B. Broidy, a financier who had pleaded guilty to bribing New York officials seven years earlier, to his fundraising committee. It was a little-noticed move that might have raised more eyebrows had Trump not broken one norm after another as the presumptive Republican nominee.
Shortly after the election, Trump and his campaign became entangled in an investigation into whether his political operation had ties to Russians. Several advisers were involved in that investigation, including his national security adviser Michael Flynn; his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; his longest-serving advisor, Roger Stone; and Cohen, his fixer and personal lawyer.
Trump, who blasted that investigation as weaponized, repeatedly attacked Cohen after he pleaded guilty to a series of crimes, including a campaign finance violation that he said was done at Trump’s behest. But the president ultimately pardoned Flynn, Manafort and Stone, part of a wave of pardons and commutations during his final weeks in office.
Trump also granted clemency to people like Jonathan Braun, a Staten Island man with a history of violent threats who was being pursued by federal officials at the time for his work as a predatory financier. Braun used a connection to the family of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as he sought clemency.
Earlier in Trump’s presidency, he commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois. It was a move opposed by some Republicans, but Trump had Blagojevich proud at a recent Republican National Committee fundraiser in Florida.
Trump’s attempts to stay in power and thwart the transition of power resulted in multiple investigations into him and his allies.
The people charged in these investigations include Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani; his White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows; his current top legal advisor, Epshteyn; his legal counsel Jenna Ellis; and a former Justice Department official, Jeffrey B. Clark.
Two other Trump advisers and allies, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, were convicted of contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas to cooperate with the House of Representatives investigation into the former president’s efforts to stay in office .
Trump’s latest behavior came against the backdrop of his lawyers’ arguments before the Supreme Court that he is immune from prosecution in the federal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. On social media, Trump has insisted that presidents should have “absolute immunity.”
Despite claiming he acted within his rights, Trump has commodified his criminal charges. He is selling campaign items with his mugshot from his indictment in Georgia and aggressively raising money on claims that he is being prosecuted.
One of the campaign’s recent fundraising efforts focused on Trump’s false claims about the FBI’s August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, the members-only Florida club that serves as his residence. search came after he defied a grand jury subpoena. requesting the return of all secret documents still in his house.
But the former president has baselessly argued that the FBI tried to kill him, using boilerplate language used in an operational warrant for the search recently released as part of a defense motion.
Prosecutors recently asked the judge overseeing the documents case to change Trump’s release conditions by banning him from making further comments that could endanger federal agents working on the case. In response, the Trump team accused them of “unsupported histrionics” and demanded sanctions against them.
“He either doesn’t know the truth, which is reckless, or he knows the truth and lied about it, which is abhorrent,” Chuck Rosenberg, a former U.S. attorney and FBI official, said of the standard operating procedures Trump has misrepresented.
“He cares deeply about exercising power, but not in the service of a greater good,” Rosenberg said. “On the contrary, he wants power – including over the Justice Department – to benefit himself and his friends, and to harm others. He sees that power as only fitting in his hands. That is a wretched corruption of what the rule of law means – and should mean – in this country, and it is very dangerous.”
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