Weekly Roundup: Donald Trump Convicted of 34 Felonies
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Last night we learned that Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 accounts of falsifying business records. Brad and Dan ask what this means for the coming months, how it will affect the election, and why the GOP refuses to abandon a man who has been impeached twice, lost his re-election campaign, and now becomes the only former president convicted of a felony. Brad is joined by Dr. Hank Willenbrink at the end of the episode to talk about the roles, performances, and characters Trump and Trump supports play in order to create a self-enclosed MAGA ecosystem impervious even to the news that he is now a convicted criminal.
Dr. Hank Willenbrink substack: https://performingforthedon.substack.com/
Book: https://www.routledge.com/Performing-for-the-Don-Theaters-of-Faith-in-the-Trump-Era/Willenbrink/p/book/9781032302898
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Axis Mundy Axis Mundy We do not need a reckless president who believes she is above the law.
Axis Mundy Guilty.
Donald Trump found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.
All 34 are felonies.
Donald Trump has now been convicted of 34 different felony crimes by a jury of his peers in Manhattan.
An unbelievable moment in American history.
Last night we learned that Donald Trump has been convicted on 34 felonies in the state of New York.
It's a stunning development in an unprecedented decade in American politics.
Trump becomes the first former president to be convicted of a felony.
We await sentencing in about a month, but questions are looming.
What does this mean for his campaign?
Can he be president if he is a convicted felon?
What kind of sentence will the judge hand down?
We'll get to some of these questions and try to understand the Trump conviction in historical context, understand the people who continue to support him, and what this might mean for the 2024 election.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Hello, I am Brad Onishi on a historic I am Brad Onishi on a historic Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
I'm without my co-host Dan Miller today who had a family emergency.
However, Dan did send in some thoughts and I'm going to be able to play those for you later as we talk about responses to the Trump conviction.
As you can imagine, there's just way more to fit in here than is possible, but I want to talk today about the road to these 34 felonies.
And what they say about Trump's life and politics and those who support him.
I want to then look at responses to this and what they tell us about the state of the country and where we're headed as we go towards sentencing and the Republican National Convention in July.
I'm also going to bring in a guest, Dr. Hank Willenbrink.
Who will talk about the ways that Donald Trump performs various roles in the public square in order to gain support and the ways that others perform for him.
He's written a new book on this topic and there's just so much to say about the ways that Trump has performed as a defendant.
The way he created a theater outside of the courtroom and the ways that he is both a martyr and a vengeful character as we move forward in the summer.
So let's start here with the road to these 34 felonies.
As you heard at the top, and many of you I'm sure remember, in 2015 and 16 Donald Trump had a chant of Lock Her Up that was meant for Hillary Clinton.
There was of course a quote-unquote scandal about Hillary's emails made worse by James Comey and the FBI's public comments just before the election and a lot of voters were put off by the idea that she was somehow above the law or didn't play by the rules that the rest of us do.
Well, as the Trump campaign and then administration proceeded, we started to see a pattern.
And it's one that I think is really worth revisiting as we think about what 34 felonies mean.
Donald Trump is now the first president to be impeached twice.
He's the first president to not oversee a peaceful transfer of power.
He's a one-term president.
He's a president who lost his party control of houses of Congress.
He's a president who had many candidates down the ticket lose on account of his endorsement.
But he's also a president whose associates and confidants have been routinely convicted of wrongdoing and felonies.
Let's just go through a few of those in order to think about the road to Trump's 34 convictions and what we heard yesterday.
We had the Lock Her Up chant.
We had the idea that if you are being investigated, that pleading the Fifth is, by omission, a guilty confession.
Confession of guilt.
Trump and others in his cabinet, especially Mike Flynn, have taken the Fifth or refused to answer on numerous occasions, of course.
Some of you are old enough to remember that Trump University had a tens of millions of dollars settlement just there at the beginning of Trump's term.
Just recently, we had the Trump Organization convicted of or decided about fraud in New York to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The leader of the Trump Org, Allen Weisselberg, is literally sitting in jail today because of that fraud.
Just before that, we had the E. Jean Carroll case that was adjudicated and made Trump an official sexual assaulter.
He had to pay millions of dollars to E. Jean Carroll and there may be a new trial due to his comments about her in the last few weeks.
And then there's all the Trump people with felonies.
His campaign chair, felon.
His deputy campaign chair, is a felon.
His personal lawyer, felon.
Chief strategist, national security advisor, trade advisor, foreign policy advisor, campaign fixer, company CFO.
All felons.
We're talking about Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Peter Navarro, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort.
Not to mention the lawyers who've been disbarred.
Jennifer Ellis, or Jen Ellis.
John Eastman, who's in his own legal trouble.
We could talk about Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff.
The list goes on and on and on and on.
And I know some of you are thinking, well, why start with this?
Like, why do we need to go back in history now?
I mean, let's just sort of sit in the moment.
Let's just sit in the moment of this former president being convicted of 34 felonies.
This decision that just felt unlikely even a month ago.
This decision that will no doubt reverberate through history.
Well, I go back in history now because Trump joins all of these people who have been close to him under the label of felon.
One of the reasons that Trump is in this position is because his former fixer, Michael Cohen, Didn't feel like he was shown loyalty by Trump and the Trump inner orbit.
So what did he do?
He sought revenge.
Michael Cohen went to jail for Donald Trump.
Michael Cohen staked his life on being a Trump confidant and loyal soldier.
And when he wasn't paid back for that, he did everything he could to take Trump down.
His testimony was obviously key in the trial.
And of course, the main protagonist here was Stormy Daniels, an adult actor who Trump cornered into a sexual encounter using power and status.
So let's just take a minute.
What I'm saying has been said.
You might have watched cable news last night.
You might've read the newspaper this morning.
You might've listened to your favorite voices as soon as this happened.
But here's the thing for me to notice from an analytical standpoint.
When you're talking about this many felonious associates, and the top boss being convicted on the testimony of a spurned enforcer seeking revenge, and an adult actor who was paid hush money not to talk about it, this sounds like a crime family.
This sounds like a crime family.
Like if you think about any other person having his team turn out to be felons, If you think about any other person whose campaign chair, deputy campaign chair, personal lawyer, chief strategist, security advisor, trade advisor, foreign policy advisor, campaign fixer, company CFO, and himself were all convicted of felonies in the last decade, you would think you're dealing with a criminal organization.
And I know that people like Sarah Kinzior and Andrea Chalupa and others talk about this all the time, but I just want to point it out today on this show.
This feels like a crime family.
This doesn't feel like, this is not an outlier.
What you're going to hear, and I'm going to get to this in a minute, what you're going to hear from Republican officials and Fox News and everyone else on the American right is that this is a travesty.
If they're coming for Donald Trump, they'll come for you too.
This is a sad day in American history.
And I think one of the reasons it's important to go from lock her up to 34 felony convictions is to see that these convictions are not an outlier.
Don't forget that Trump has three other open cases.
What if I told you that there was a person who had four open cases in four different places?
And now he's a convicted felon 34 times over and his closest 10 advisors, or at least most of his closest 10 advisors over the last six, eight years have been convicted of felonies too.
You would think, oh, you're talking about a mob boss, but that's not who we're talking about.
We're talking about a man who is leading in the polls to become president of the United States once again.
So here's Jon Favreau, the very famous and well-known host of Pod Save America, but he put this out yesterday and I thought it was right on the nose.
It just truly hit me that right now we're waiting for a jury to decide if an ex-president is guilty of unlawfully influencing the election he won in 2016, a case his political opponents' own Justice Department declined to prosecute.
We're also waiting for the Supreme Court majority he created To decide if he's immune from prosecution for trying to overturn the election he lost in 2020.
This candidate is currently leading the race for president in 2024.
Friends, we have a situation where a man who did everything he could to suppress media stories, who tried to rig the game of the open and free flow of information, a man who went into a hush money scheme that was fraudulent or at least, you know, led to
Lying, basically saying he was making payments to Michael Cohen for a retainer when it was really for Michael Cohen's services in paying Stormy Daniels and so on.
We have a situation where a man who was able to do things to influence the 2016 election and win by the smallest of margins in terms of the electoral college, then became president and his own Justice Department declined to prosecute him.
And then he put three judges on the nine person Supreme Court and they're waiting right now to decide if he's immune from prosecution again, whether that's for trying to overturn the election or if it's just general presidential immunity.
And now he's leading the race to be president for another term.
It's astounding when you think about 2016 to 2024.
It's astounding how you think about the ways that democracy can eat itself.
That it can be autoimmune.
The ways that you can have someone like Trump bring in bad actors into an ecosystem and just destroy that ecosystem from within itself.
And what we have, I think, in this trial is one of the last checks on the insidious and invasive nature of Trump within the American political ecosystem.
Now, this leads to all kinds of questions.
Is the president immune?
What is the Supreme Court going to say?
Is that going to have any tone setting for what we're going to see ahead of time?
How can somebody who, in the state of Florida, cannot vote as a felon, or at least if he's in jail at the time of the election, how can somebody who's not allowed to vote become the person you vote for and the leader of the country?
These are all huge questions.
Now, there's also just other questions, practical questions about sentencing.
You've probably already seen a lot of pundits saying that in cases like these that the person may not see jail time, they'll see probation, or they'll see home confinement, or they have to pay a fine or do community service.
And I'm not going to pretend that I know.
I don't know what the judge is going to do here.
I will say, this is not like any other case.
It is not normal to have a case come before your docket where somebody is trying to falsify business records in order to win a presidential election.
So it's one thing to say, well, in a normal case, when somebody falsifies the business record, it's really no jail time.
Yep.
You're right.
I guess.
But comparisons are comparisons because the two things are similar and they're also different.
And this case is different than any other case.
So we will see what happens.
Now, I want to talk about some of the responses from the American right and from elected members in the GOP.
So let's start with Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk says, they rigged the trial to rig the election, make them pay.
He says in another post on X, they just executed a legal assassination.
What will they do next?
So again, let's look at the key words, rigged the trial and executed assassination.
You don't have to be a rhetorician to understand what he's doing here.
He's using charged words that make out what happened with a jury of Donald Trump's peers in a courtroom run in an American state that this was an assassination.
There's way more of these.
If you tuned in yesterday to watch Charlie Couric, he was there with Jack Posobiec and others.
They were all wearing their MAGA hats and kind of, I guess, trying to garner some sense of dynamism and effervescence in the wake of bad news or whatever.
Once again, it was people donning the Trump uniform.
We saw this last week with The VP hopefuls all showing up to dress in the Trump uniform and the red tie.
Well, here's four guys wearing the red hat.
All right.
In order to talk about the GOP responses, I want to bring in Dan, who was able to really go over these and talk about them.
So let me bring in Dan Miller, my co-host, to get us up to speed on what Mike Johnson and others said about this and some of his takeaways.
What I wanted to focus on, and this is a theme that I've talked about before, and I hope you'll bear with me talking about it again, but I think it really is important and bears the repeating, I want to talk about the GOP as the so-called party of law and order.
So, surprising exactly nobody.
The GOP has hinted, has indicated strong support for Trump for weeks.
We've talked about congressional leaders showing up at court to show Trump that they support him.
We have, we've mentioned, and I know that lots of news media have talked about behind the scenes, the GOP preparing for a guilty verdict, thinking that this was a probable outcome, and sort of strategizing around this.
So, surprising exactly nobody, given all of that.
The GOP leaders and politicians, they came out swinging in support for Trump following the announcement of the verdict.
And so, just some examples of this.
So, Mike Johnson, whom we've talked about before, he attended the trial to show his support for Trump.
Mike Johnson said quote, today is a shameful day in American history.
Democrats cheered as they convicted the leader of the opposing party on ridiculous charges predicated on the testimony of a disbarred convicted felon.
That was a purely political exercise, not a legal one.
I've got to say a couple of things about this.
Number one, Democrats didn't cheer.
They were very subdued.
I think it's clear that they're not positive about the best way to play this, so there was no great cheering or bold statements or anything like that.
I also just want to point this out.
The leader of the other political party... So we're not like, I don't know, the British or lots of Europeans where there is a leader of every political party.
There is technically no leader of...
The GOP.
Trump is not even, technically speaking, the GOP presidential candidate yet.
So he is not technically the leader of the GOP.
I think everybody knows what they mean when they say that, and I'm not trying to be obtuse, but I think it's worth paying attention to the rhetoric.
All right, so that was Mike Johnson.
Here's Jim Jordan, another staunch Trump ally.
He is also the chair of the House Judiciary Committee.
Quote, the verdict is a travesty of justice.
The Manhattan Kangaroo Court shows what happens when our justice system is weaponized by partisan prosecutors in front of a biased judge with an unfair process designed to keep President Trump off the campaign trail and avoid bringing attention to President Biden's failing radical policies.
He also, it's worth noting, posted his comment before the verdict had even fully been read.
He had it ready to go as soon as the first guilty came out.
Jim Jordan's like post.
Let's put it up there.
Lindsey Graham, another one of our favorites, another member of the House Judiciary Committee, said, quote, I expect this case to be reversed on appeal.
This verdict says more about the system than the allegations.
It will be seen as politically motivated and unfair, and it will backfire tremendously on the political left.
And then finally, not to be left out, even if his response was more subdued.
Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, said, these charges never should have been brought in the first place.
I expect the conviction to be overturned on appeal.
And certainly by the time I record this, there will be more soundbites.
There will be more people to listen to.
But just a sampling from some of the big names in the GOP.
So, here's what we didn't hear.
From the GOP.
We didn't hear anybody say, you know what, I really disagree with this, but the jury has spoken.
Trump was judged by a jury of his peers and found to be guilty and we need to accept that and move on.
I certainly didn't hear any notion, any suggestion that a convicted felon who may not be able to vote in his own state.
I read a couple of things.
It's a little unclear what the status will be as a resident of Florida now that he has a convicted felon.
So the presumptive GOP nominee might not be able to vote in the presidential election.
I don't know.
I think that's symbolic.
I think that... I don't know.
There's a lot we could do with that.
But what you don't hear is them saying, man, he's a convicted felon.
He's just not the kind of person we want in the White House.
That's just not the kind of person we want representing the United States.
You don't hear that.
None of that.
Okay?
So none of that's surprising.
None of what they said is surprising.
None of what they didn't say is surprising.
Here are some takeaways that I have from this that I think stand out and I think we'll be talking about for some time.
The one, again, is that the GOP's claims to be the party of law and order is once again revealed as a farce.
Now, we've talked about this before.
I hammer on this a lot.
What it reveals is there are no depths the GOP won't go to to try and regain power.
But it also further reveals, if we were to do a sort of longer historical look, and we've done that before on the show, you can go back and listen to episodes.
Brad does great work on some of this stuff in both his interviews, his work on the podcast, his book as well.
So we've talked about this a lot.
But what it really reveals to me, or even more brings into starker relief, are the classist and racist roots of that GOP sloganeering of being the party of law and order.
We know that the law and order mantra has always been aimed primarily at crimes in minority communities, at crimes committed by minorities.
And you can look at this from everything from Richard Nixon's campaign people saying after the fact that following the Civil Rights Amendment and things like that, they're like, well, we can't just be racist.
We've got to have coded language for this and that that's what this was.
And that has been stock and trade.
of the GOP ever since.
You could look at sentencing guidelines.
You could look at sentencing disparities.
You can look at incarceration of people of color in the United States.
On and on and on and on and on.
There it is.
We know that.
But it's also classist.
And what I mean by that is, it has never been aimed primarily at white-collar crime, and white-collar crime is primarily the crimes of the wealthy and the white.
It has never been aimed at them.
And even when white collar crimes, which often impact far greater numbers of people than lots of forms of, say, property damage, property theft, even some forms of violent crime, damages more people, Is more expensive to fix, has longer-lasting effects, and sentences are almost never as strict as they would be for things like, you know, stealing a car or breaking into a house or something like that, right?
If you're someone who's white-collared, especially if you're wealthy, especially if you're white, law and order just doesn't apply to you.
What the GOP likes to hammer away is an emphasis on law and order.
Other places, for you, that's just good old free enterprise.
You're just working the system.
You're just doing what you need to do to make your way in the world.
And I think we see that here, where there is no notion that what Trump did should be prosecuted as a crime.
And I think that aside from the, he's Trump, we're going to do anything we can for Trump side of things, I think it does reflect in a really vetted way The fallacy of the GOP as the party of law and order.
So that's a first takeaway.
A second one, I want to revisit again the kind of conspiracism floating around in this.
It's like the GOP just can't get away from it.
We've heard the accusations over and over and over.
They did not start once the verdict was read.
That this was a merely political exercise, that it was rigged, that it was a kangaroo court.
We talked about Jim Jordan saying that just a few minutes ago.
Here's what I want to think about with that.
Let's just say that it was political.
I don't think that saying it was simply political, I don't think that that holds, okay?
But let's imagine that it did in this sense.
That the charges dealt with something that wouldn't normally come into view.
And yeah, if it wasn't the former president, maybe the charges wouldn't come forward.
If it's the mayor of, I don't know, Sioux City or somewhere, and this came out, maybe they wouldn't be brought up on federal charges.
I don't know.
Okay?
But let's say that that's the case.
Let's say, okay, they did this because it's the former president and that's a big deal.
A jury still unanimously came to the conclusion, and in my view rather quickly, that Trump committed the crime.
I've discussed that before.
If you're going to say that it was all a conspiracy, you're going to have to say that everybody on the jury was in on it.
That the jury was rigged, that somehow you're going to ignore things like the silly prosecution decision to do what Trump wanted to do, to deny that ever happened, to put Stormy Daniels on the stand, which I think was in hindsight was really significant.
People thought at the moment it was significant.
That's been confirmed.
You're going to have to ignore all of that.
And have this notion that every aspect of this trial was set up.
Not just a judge that's biased, not just a prosecutor who's out to score big points by going after the Republican former president, but everybody on that jury.
And then another thing that I bring up with conspiracies all the time is the same Democrats and leftists who you think can't put two socks on in the morning.
They can't get anything right.
They can't do anything without screwing it up.
Except for this.
Except for getting 34 counts against a former GOP president.
Settling with that, they can make the stars align, swing the jury, and so forth.
Okay?
And here's another piece related to that.
I mean, so the conspiracism doesn't hold, but like another piece related to that, and I think this is an important piece of rhetoric, because we also don't really hear those GOP folks saying that Trump actually didn't do it.
They complain about the political motivations.
They complain about the decision and so forth, but we don't really hear them saying, Trump clearly didn't do it.
He clearly didn't do anything wrong.
This kind of ties the two points together.
It's a conspiracy to get Trump, but it also ties together those disparities in so-called law and order that even if it was illegal, the charges shouldn't have been brought.
It wasn't fair.
When it's a rich white guy and a presumptive GOP nominee, Even if he broke the law, even if he committed felonies, it's not really fair to go after.
So even if it was quote-unquote politically motivated, and again, I don't think that it was, but even if it was, it doesn't mean Trump is innocent or that it was some sort of conspiracy.
And I think that that's worth paying attention to.
And then I think a final point related to this that's worth listening to is also the disdain That the GOP is showing for regular Americans, for those people who were seated on that jury, not by choice.
We've probably all had jury duty.
You get called in.
You don't know what it's going to be.
You go through the process of selection and seating.
Just the open disdain for, quote unquote, the system.
It's easy to critique the system.
It's easy to say it was co-opted and make that abstract.
But what they're saying is that those regular Americans who reached this verdict, They did so because they are biased.
They are part of a conspiracy.
They're out to get Trump.
And if I were the Democrats, I would be hammering on that, that the GOP has no respect for regular Americans.
And then the final takeaway, and folks have talked about this, there'll be more to say on it, is that it strengthened Trump with his followers.
We've seen this for weeks.
There was immediately, Trump was fundraising on the claims that he's a political prisoner.
His allies were asking people to give money now that he's been convicted.
We've seen this for a long time, we've seen it coming, now it's playing out.
All I want to say is this, MAGA Nations celebrates the idea of a felonious president.
Nothing better illustrates Trump's claims to immunity and a unified executive and anything else than being convicted of felonies and just shrugging it off and continuing to make the claims that he's making.
And MAGA Nation loves it.
And I think that tells us everything we need to know about Trump supporters, about the contemporary GOP, about the direction of a second Trump presidency.
The fact that this is celebrated, this outcome is celebrated and motivates His base, I think, is the real key.
We'll see what happens with independents.
We'll see what happens with other voters.
But I think it tells us everything we need to know about Trump and the GOP.
I want to just finish this up by going back to Jon Favreau, who tweeted this last night.
In Bragg's first 15 months on the job, the Manhattan's DA's office filed 166 felony counts for falsifying business records against 34 defendants.
I haven't heard a single Republican politician explain why they think the law shouldn't apply to Donald Trump.
A grand jury of ordinary Americans decided there was enough specified criminal conduct to indict Donald Trump.
Another jury of ordinary Americans decided there was enough evidence to convict Donald Trump, a jury approved by Trump and his lawyers, who were given ample opportunity to present their case, call witnesses, and get their day in court.
Is it the position of Republican politicians that they can only be tried for breaking the law if the charges are brought by Republican DAs, the case is heard by a Republican judge, and the verdict is rendered by a Republican jury?
If so, be honest and say that.
What John drives at here is something I've talked about on this show quite often, which is If you live in MAGA World and if you have gone down the road that so many Christian nationalists have in this country, so many folks on the American right, if you think of the world as simply friend and enemy, as we talked about last week, then sure, there is no way to get a fair trial if somebody is in a district that is populated by people who vote differently to them or think differently to them.
There's no way to get a fair trial from a judge who was this and this and this.
The assumption from the start is that it's not fair because that person's not on my team.
It's not that it's not fair because of their actions, because of their conduct.
Like when I think of like Eileen Cannon or Alito, people we criticize often on this show, I think of like their actions.
Here's what they've done that seems unfair or not correct.
But the assumption here by the Republican politicians that Dan talked about, by the people that Favreau's referencing, by the Charlie Kirks of the world is just, well, it can't be fair because I'm not a Republican, so there's no way it can be fair.
It's a friend-enemy approach to politics, and as we've talked about, it has such a deleterious effect on a public square that's supposed to be built on the idea That the values are equality and justice and fairness.
And so, once again, we see that at play here.
And what it does is have a real-world effect.
It weakens trust in institutions.
It erodes them.
It makes this about revenge.
It makes this about tit for tat.
It makes this about getting back at the people that got you.
Donald Trump has already said that he would get revenge on Joe Biden and arrest his political enemies.
We've talked on this show about potential futures where people like Rachel Maddow or Hillary Clinton are served arrest warrants and so on.
There's just a sense in which There's nothing more to life, to politics, to building a sense of society where we live together as humans, except for friend and enemy.
And you cannot have democracy that way.
And that is why Trump and the people that support him, including so many Christian nationalists, appear to be not friends of or supporting of democracy in these cases.
All right, let's take a break, come back, and talk about what this means and if it will matter.
Be right back.
Okay, if you've been following news, if you've been reading X tweets, if you've been up to speed on social media, or you just simply sat down and read the New York Times or LA Times this morning, here's what you probably know.
We don't know the sentence yet.
We won't know it until July, and it is going to happen three days before the National Republican Convention.
We don't know if he'll go to jail.
We don't know if he'll get probation.
We don't know if he'll wear an ankle bracelet.
We don't know if he'll have home detention.
This is a question that our legal system has never faced.
Like, not even close.
I don't think we've ever had a situation where there is a... Well, we've certainly never had a president convicted of felonies.
That's a first.
But we, following on that, have never had a situation where we don't know his punishment and if that punishment might hinder him.
If he is elected president and he has home detention, can he go out and visit various places of the country?
Can he take foreign trips?
How do we have a commander in chief who can't leave his home?
How does that even work?
When you start to go down those kinds of scenarios, you start to see something that I do want to keep hold of.
And that's this.
Donald Trump being convicted of 34 felonies is a big deal because it puts into relief the idea that are you really going to have a president who is not able to travel?
One who's on probation?
One who a court of law just months before his inauguration is saying, yeah, you are a criminal.
Do you really want to vote for that person?
And if you're a Republican party, do you really want to put that person forward as your nominee?
Now if you are really wonky you have probably already seen that there are polls showing and there were there were reports of this all over legacy media outlets almost as soon as the Trump convictions came down and some of them had it up ahead of time that show that this will not They have a major effect on polls and perhaps voting patterns.
There is kind of data showing that this might sway 15% of the electorate.
Brent Tannehill, who's been on the show, talked about a kind of 1.5% swing in the polls in certain places.
And so you are going to hear people say that this doesn't matter, that this will not have an effect on the campaign.
I'm not sure I agree with that for a number of reasons.
One, I think that there's a very simple line to folks who are undecided or independent or on the fence or are really getting tired of Trump's antics, even though they voted for him once or twice in the past, to say, Doesn't it seem really, really embarrassing for us to send a man to France or Japan or to a G20 summit who's wearing an ankle bracelet, who's a convicted felon?
Is that who you want representing your country?
Is that who we want to tell our kids to look up to and to admire?
Do we really want to make the case that a man whose 10 closest associates are all felons And he is now a felon, should be the leader we uphold to our people.
So I do think there will be people that will hear that and be swayed.
Now, you'll say, great, Brad, good for you, but what about the data?
And I would say, look, the data might show that a Trump conviction would have an effect on, say, 15% of independents, or it may cause a single-digit change in how certain registered Republican voters will think about who they're going to pick.
I want to remind you that all the other polls and pollsters, people like Nate Cohn and others, are talking about narrow victories in the Electoral College.
There was an article this week about how Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, these kinds of places are really where Biden can see a path to victory.
And if we go and look back at the two previous elections, The margins in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have been so slim along with Michigan.
And so if you think about a 15% change in independence, or if you think about 6 or 8% of Republicans changing their mind, well, that could have a really big effect in a place or in a county that is going to be decided by 5,000 votes or 10,000 votes or so on.
So I don't think that it doesn't matter.
I want to say also, though, that it does matter across the country, and I think it matters across the world.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat tweeted almost as soon as we heard the Trump conviction.
That this could have never happened in places with strongmen leaders.
Places where Viktor Orban or Vladimir Putin or Lukashenko or others are in charge.
That there's no way in those countries with strongmen that Trump seems to admire so much that this would have happened.
Because there's no way that there would have been processes in place, democratic institutions, and a willingness on the part of ordinary citizens and people like Alvin Bragg to pursue a case that would be so perilous and so dangerous.
There would have been forces that stopped this.
And what I saw yesterday on social media were people saying over and over again that they had breathed a sigh of relief for the first time since the Biden election or since 2016.
I'd seen people who talked about stopping what they're doing during the day and crying.
Some of you have heard the cheers outside the courtroom or you've seen footage of New Yorkers celebrating in the street.
There are so many people who have talked about the ways that this is something that means a lot to them.
Let me read somebody named Ashley Daniels who's quoted in the New York Times in a piece on American reactions to Trump's conviction.
Ashley Daniel says, my first initial thought was joy because it's been going on for so long, just waiting for some sort of justice.
I feel a little bit amazed.
So there's this sense of like, finally, somebody who has done so much wrong and so much hurt, who has introduced so many poisonous things to our public square, a man who's Ten advisors and administrators and others have been convicted of felonies themselves.
It's finally brought down by the legal system.
There are others.
I'm glad to see it.
That's Regina Ponder in Arizona.
Here's Kevin Holloway in Los Angeles.
He's gotten away with so much that I'm finding it hard to believe.
This is wild that justice is actually going to be done this time.
Now, are there others that are saying this is a travesty and they're towing the line of the Republican Party and the American right?
Sure.
But I guess my commentary is this, like it mattered when Joe Biden won and not because so many of you were like so thrilled about Joe Biden.
Let's just be very honest.
It's not like the enthusiasm for like a young JFK or 2008 Barack Obama.
That was not the case when Biden was elected, but there were still people in the street.
There were still people celebrating.
Why?
Because American democracy in its imperfections and tragedies had held in some form.
That the institutions that are supposed to mean that no one is above the law, that everybody can be held accountable, that we don't have a king, we're not led by a gangster, we're not a mob rule country.
Had meant that Joe Biden had become president because enough people voted for democracy, if not voting for Joe Biden as their favorite person in the world.
And in this case, Trump getting 34 felonies, it means something to so many people across the country.
Hold them accountable.
Justice is done.
No one's above the law.
It sends a message.
And the world is watching and the world sees it too.
The United States can still talk about Being a place where no matter who you are, a former president or anyone else, you can be held liable for your actions.
That we are not going to give in to authoritarianism or fascism just yet.
So on an emotional level, I think this matters a lot.
I think things like this breathe wind into the sails of hope, and that could sound very kumbayash, but if you see things like this, you might be willing to say, all right, It's June.
We got like four months, five months to do this.
Let's do this.
The man was convicted of 34 felonies.
I'm ready to jump in.
I'm energized.
I'm ready to see this carried through.
Whatever it is I do as a political person, whether I write postcards or I help at a polling place, whether it's campaigning for a certain person or a certain issue, I'm ready.
Let's go.
Because this is what it feels like.
Do you remember the feeling when you knew Donald Trump lost?
Do you remember the feeling when you heard about the conviction?
Do you remember the feeling way back when, when Barack Obama won?
And some of you, you know, are going to email me and say, yeah, but Barack Obama did all this stuff that I didn't love.
And I agreed.
But there was this sense of like exuberance, relief, hope.
So this matters.
It matters to me.
It matters to a lot of people across the country.
Now, some people are worried.
Are there actually going to be repercussions?
What's actually going to happen?
Can you be a president who's convicted of felonies and remains in power?
Yeah, those are all open.
They're all there.
But I just don't want to hear from the social scientists and the pollsters, well, it only moved the, you know, it's very easy to read an article from CBS that says, well, probably only 12% of voters are going to care.
Do you remember?
The numbers from the last two elections?
And more importantly, what is it that gets people to go vote and care?
What gets average people to actually say, OK, I'll participate again?
I'm willing to try.
It's things like this.
I told my mom yesterday, she was over at my house and I came down the stairs and I said, Trump's convicted.
And she said, she pumped her fist.
My mom's not like what I would call a political person.
She's not somebody who listens to NPR.
When I was on NPR one time, I told her I was on NPR and she kind of looked at me and wondered what NPR was because it's just not in her universe.
My mom is not that person.
She is not that like latte drinking liberal who, you know, shops at Whole Foods or whatever you're picturing.
My mom, when I was growing up, was a Republican.
She voted for Republican people.
But when I told her about the conviction, she was so glad.
And you know what the first thing she said to me?
She said, I'm so proud of that jury.
And it hit me.
Here's my mom, who doesn't watch any cable news, who does not read the New York Times, who, for the most part, had no idea what I was talking about when I told her I was going to be on an NPR show.
And her first response was, I'm so proud of that jury.
Here's just like an American saying, I can't believe another American like me had the guts to convict that man.
Because this is a country where no one's above the law.
And that meant something to me, and I think it should mean something to all of us.
Now, we can talk about the numbers.
We can talk about the polls.
We can talk about the percentages.
We can talk about how much jail time he's going to do and what's going to happen.
There are so many Black Swan events ahead of us.
There are so many surprises.
There are so many things that we can't predict as we go into November.
But this is a big day.
And it's a day that is not just symbolically big or a kind of matter of formality.
I think this is a day that will have an effect on the rest of the story as it goes forward.
All right, y'all, in order to finish up today, I want to bring in a guest and that is Dr. Hank Willenbrink, who is the author of Performing for the Dawn, Theaters of Faith in the Trump Era.
Dr. Willenbrink is a scholar of theater and performance studies and has written a book about the ways that Trump not only performs as a religious actor in various settings, but the ways that religious people bring Trump into religious performances and they themselves perform.
In various kinds of theater in order to instill belief in Trump as God's chosen candidate, as a man who will save the nation and restore its covenant with God, and so on and so forth.
So I wanted to bring in Dr. Willenbrink to talk about the performances that Trump put on in the courtroom, but also yesterday as somebody convicted.
He spoke outside the trial.
He spoke this morning in a freewheeling press conference at Trump Tower.
Here's my conversation with Dr. Willenbrink on the ways that Trump is performing and there are others performing for him.
Okay, Dr. Willenbrink, it's wonderful to have you.
You're a first-time guest, so thanks for joining me on Straight White American Jesus.
Thanks for having me.
I have to tell you that I'm an admirer of this podcast.
When I was working on the book, I very much wished that it was around.
There you go.
Well, it's always wonderful to hear that.
We're here to talk about the performances and theaters surrounding Donald Trump.
You've written a new book, Performing for the Dawn, The Theaters of Faith in the Trump Era, that really Gets at these questions from a theater and performance studies perspective, mixed in with religious studies, which I think is so welcome.
But hey, last night was historic.
Let's get to the point.
Donald Trump has been a defendant.
He's now convicted.
As you examine Trump in these last months as somebody in court, somebody playing the role of being accused of crimes, what strikes you from a performance or theater kind of perspective?
A lot of things.
And I would say that, you know, again, we're kind of coming right off of this.
I, like most people, I think have been kind of marinating in the reaction.
So one thing that I've been thinking a lot about is the progression of this.
You know, Trump has essentially taken on the role of defendant.
Since really the beginning of the year, through the various E. Jean Carroll cases, through the New York civil trial, to the point where he's even kind of sloughed off doing primary campaign events to appear in court.
So he really took that mantle on, and what seemed to change at the beginning of this first trial, when he's up for criminal prosecution as opposed to civil, Was a lot of the discourse around Trump at the beginning was the ways that the system had quote-unquote humiliated him.
There was a New Yorker article that called this that he was being ritually humiliated.
And in a lot of ways, that's what we seem to see, that he was arriving to the courthouse alone.
There were all the things about, you know, whether or not he's sleeping, etc.
But really, watching him speak after the verdict yesterday, and watching him today give his press conference, there was a real sense that he had changed the tenor of what was going on in the courtroom, and that's mostly, I would say, by manipulating what was happening outside the courtroom.
And so one of the things that I think that we're all seeing right now is Trump changing or moving the goalposts from the legal status or his legal status to the political status, where he kind of came out and said immediately, you know, November 5th is the real trial here.
And so that's, I think, one of the one of the big things that that progression has stood out to me.
And the other thing I would say is the different ways that Trump has played the role of criminal defendant.
He's leaned into it.
You know, the courtroom drama is an accepted drama or accepted genre of drama.
We're all used to law and order.
We're all used to the idea that a verdict is something that's climactic and is in a lot of times Uh, supposed to be the end of something, but it oftentimes is not.
And so, we're also kind of living in this aftermath of, okay, the verdict was guilty, what happens?
And what happened before it to lead us up to this moment?
So, I would say I'm thinking a lot about that.
It is.
It is one of those moments where, and I think Americans have grown used to this over the last however many years, whether it was with special counsel Mueller, whether it was with impeachment trials, you know, are we going to get a decision?
And then, OK, we got a decision.
Now what?
And as you're saying, Sentencing's not until July.
Will he be sentenced in a way that will mean anything for the election, but also if he wins, what does that mean?
We have a situation where we know that he's going to do everything he can to appeal and slow down and delay.
When does it actually come down, okay, Judge Mershon says you were sentenced to this, the appeal court upheld it, that's the final say, no more appeals, no more, you know, legal gumming up the system, right?
So, you're right.
In some ways, yesterday felt like a crescendo, and in other ways, it's like, okay, now what?
Like, is he actually going to get punished?
And I think there's people waking up wondering that today.
Yeah, we're living in the aftermath.
And, you know, you say crescendo, and of course, coming from theater and performance studies, I would say a climax, right?
And, you know, I was One of the things that I was listening to was Norm Eisen, who was Obama's ethics czar.
And in one of the appearances, he was talking about that Trump had an original sin, and that original sin was not divesting back.
And if you remember that press conference where he had all of these, you know, those stacks of paper and things.
And that, again, kind of really struck me with the idea of Trump as a tragic hero, Trump as this person who's kind of like undone by his own greed.
I don't know, I'm not speaking legally here, but there's a good chance that had he divested, this would not have been the same kind of goings on as it is now, right?
So, you can almost kind of like, again, trace that character trajectory.
And it's one of the things that he seems to be doing now as well, right?
We're living in the aftermath, but he's calling himself the Nelson Mandela of the United States, right?
He's taking, there's that New York Times story about the kind of like outlaw image, yada, yada, yada, right?
He's always had, that's always been part of his persona, right?
Whether it was the kind of claim about, you know, being able to kill someone on Fifth Avenue, et cetera, that's always been part of his persona.
But now we're just kind of seeing it come to the fore in a way that we hadn't seen it before.
And I would say that in a lot of ways, one of the things that I'm hearing in the kind of echo of this is the way that he's putting the judicial system on trial the same way that he just put the electoral system on trial in 2020, and the same way that he put the whole country on trial back the first time that he descended those elevators in Trump Tower.
I want to stay on that because I think that's a really important point here is, you know, if I think about roles and performance, it almost feels like Trump's character for the last eight years has been the man who every time you try to put him on trial, he puts you on trial and the you here could be The election system, as you just said.
It could be the Electoral College.
It could be state legislatures and their electors.
It could be, you know, courts that are trying to decide things about whether or not ballots were, you know, done in the right way and all the standards were upheld and the procedures were followed.
He puts, I mean, we could go back to COVID.
He puts the like the whole medical profession on trial.
And as I mean, I have literally played in the last few weeks on this show, the clips of Trump saying, why don't we bleach inside the body?
Could we get light in there?
And him boasting about like, maybe I just have an acumen for being a doctor.
Maybe if I wasn't doing this, I'd be I mean, he literally said those words like he suggested that he's like smarter than the surgeon.
So does that make sense to you as like as a performance, you know, expert?
The way that Trump does anything is you try to put him under the microscope and he just turns it back on you and he puts you on trial.
The judge, the election system, the judicial branch, it does not matter and it almost feels like Where are we going to fall in 2024?
Are we going to side with those in our system that have deemed him guilty or are we going to allow him to indict our system and say it's guilty and we choose him to be this strongman fixer?
Will, I think you're right and I think that You know, in 2020, what Trump did was he undermined the pillar of democracy that is the elections, and now he's undermining the other pillar of democracy that is trial by jury.
These are the two things that I think if you look at what is a democracy, these are the two things that really stand out.
And now he's undermining the other one.
Um, and so I, I would, I would agree with that from the, if I want to just shift it a little bit and think a little bit more about performance, I, I would kind of, you know, take a second and just kind of think about that term reality TV president that we've, we've thrown around and think really clearly about what we mean by that.
On the one hand, it is a pejorative to call someone reality TV is to essentially imply that they're fake, but there's a lot of things about reality TV that actually create its own reality.
We've seen, you know, the, uh, what is it?
The, the, I'm, I'm not here to make friends person, right?
We've seen all of these different elements, these different, what we would call in theater stock characters.
And Trump seems to contain multitudes of these.
I think at some point in the book, I may say something like, I think of him as kind of like an entire performance ecosystem.
Like, as a whole.
That he is the person who's directing, telling his lawyer what to say.
He is the actor, the person who's kind of like, you know, the person who comes out and says the lines.
He's also the audience.
He's also the producer.
He's kind of the entire thing at the same time.
And that's, I think, what's so... I think that's one of the things that's so unique about him.
And it's also one of the things that's so difficult about him.
And then I'd just add on, I think, one other thing to where you began about that kind of, you know, if you accuse him of something, he's going to accuse you of doing it.
It's the kind of like immutable law of the Trump era.
But this is something that now the right has taken and run with.
I mean, the State of the Union watching Marjorie Taylor Greene with the Say Her Name pin, this kind of like, I would call it troll-y kind of behavior, is just something that is so in the right that that's exactly what you're seeing in terms of... So it's this genie that's been let out of the bottle.
And it's funny because in thinking about that, You know, kind of right before this is when I was watching the Trump press conference, I was thinking about if you went through and hit the different beats of the speech between the 2015 speech in Trump Tower and this speech, he's saying exactly the same thing.
He starts off attacking, attacking migrants.
But what's interesting is, and I almost wanted to have, and I will admit that I did not watch the whole thing because it was kind of low energy, honestly.
He was really just rambling and all over the place.
He looked shaken in a way that I don't think I'd seen him until the beginning of this last trip, honestly.
I didn't watch the whole thing, but I was almost going to yell at the TV, say her name, like, say Stormy Daniels, say Stephanie Clifford.
And as close to that as he's gotten, he actually hasn't gone there.
And so there's a really interesting dynamic there about him being able to read the audience and not read the audience.
You know, it's really fascinating.
It is fascinating.
I want to come back to a point you made, though.
So you just said something I think is so worth hovering on, and that is, Reality star television, Trump is his own ecosystem of performance.
He's main character, he's the director, he's the audience.
Like it's so fascinating to think about it in that way.
What I want to ask you is, okay, so if that's true, how does he then inject that mode of performing into our politics such that so much of our politics is now poisoned.
Because you're exactly right in that he's unique.
Ron DeSantis tried to beat Trump, didn't work out.
He's just, now he's down in Florida and we're not really hearing from Ron anymore.
He's not on the TV, nobody cares, nobody's calling.
The whole thing.
And I think trying to beat Trump is not a strategy that has worked out for others.
However, mimicking Trump or performing for Trump within the ecosystem that Trump has brought into the politics does work.
And that's where your book really seems to make so much sense to me, is that if you're in the American right and you're Vivek Ramaswamy, or you are Rick Scott, or you are J.D.
Vance, or you are Kristi Noem, The only chance you have of being a politician in the United States is to perform within this weird ongoing play where one man is their main character, director, stock characters, minor supporting role and the audience.
And you just got to get in there and hope he doesn't crush you in the churning of that one man play that's been going on for 78 years.
What do you think of that idea?
Look, when I was writing the book, one of the things I was trying to figure out is like, is Trump unique or is he kind of capturing these different narratives that already exist?
And I think the answer to that is yes.
as yes um he is unique because he's kind of this big tent he that under which you can have christian nationalists and you can have you know a particular strain of cons you know paleo conservatives or this kind of thing that under which you can have Christian nationalists and you can have, you know, a particular strain of, you know, paleoconservatives or this kind of thing.
He's kind of this figure that all of these things can fit underneath, right?
You can have anyone from J.D. Vance to anyone from J.D. Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene to, you know, before the trial came out, you know, I was kind of going, you know, is Nikki Haley really supporting him again?
Are all these people kind of keep coming back?
And the question is, why do they keep coming back?
And so there's part of it that he's so unique.
And I think that that time span that you just laid out there has a lot to do with it, right?
He's been around a while.
He's been a major character in America for a very long time.
But I think part of it, too, is that he's able to capture and speak to particular elements in a certain way.
That other people kind of aren't seeing.
And so for me, the moment that I was like, oh, there's something going on that I didn't realize was when I started to kind of really look at the 2016 election and look at the support that he was getting primarily among evangelicals.
And the question, of course, is, well, why?
And well, part of it was because Trump hadn't brought the evangelicals under his tent.
Right.
They were open.
They were essentially his opening acts.
At all of these rallies, right?
So he was, in a sense, kind of like giving them the endorsement already.
So in thinking about, like, how has he infected our politics or how has he changed our politics?
I think in a lot of ways, one of the things that he's done is he's formed his own coalition.
He's a coalition of one.
And underneath that coalition, it's taken over the GOP in a particular way that you get everyone from Mitch McConnell to Vivek.
To all of these different people.
And so that's why I think this idea, you know, we use Big Tent.
It's almost like a 21st century version of fusionism, right?
It's all in there at the same time.
This is, yeah, I'm really, there's like, if you could see the inside of my brain right now, it would just be exploding with colors and all kinds of things, because there's so many things I'm thinking of, but what you're making me understand is the mechanics of performance and authoritarianism together.
So like, if I take what you said, which I think is so insightful, and that is, here's Donald Trump.
It's a one-man show from start to finish.
Like, he doesn't allow you to direct him.
It's not like he's a main... It's not like he's Jon Hamm, or he's like Ronald Reynolds, or Aubrey Plaza, and it's like, okay, I got a great director.
You know, I'm Scarlett Johansson.
This great director helped me... Nope, you don't get to direct Trump.
He's the director.
He's also the main character.
But then he's somehow the audience.
Like, he has to look how he's supposed to look, and that's all that matters.
And then if you are, anybody who wants to get on board with the performance and the spectacle that he's doing, you just have to agree to those terms.
You're entering a theater, you're opening the door and going in a theater where there's this one-man narcissist.
And there's no other choice.
So if you're a Republican, and I've said this on this show like a million times, like there's still like Mitt Romney who's retiring.
There are people like Larry Hogan who's like on the outs in Maryland because he won't get on board.
Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, they're all not part of the Republican Party in essence because they have not stayed in the theater.
They got out of the theater.
And then everybody else is like, you know, people use these words, cult.
It's their brainwash, and I don't love those words, but I understand what people are saying.
It's like, why won't you ever deprogram from Trump?
And I think the answer is because you're in this theater of the absurd, where one man is the director of the main character in the audience, and if you get out of it, you have nothing left.
So this is how You get fascism.
People are just, like, throwing their entire lives into this one performance and this one man, and they won't leave the theater.
I may sound like a crazy person right now, but I'm just thinking on the fly, because I'm so, like, enthralled by what you said.
Well, a couple of things just to throw in.
I mean, a couple, like, little anecdotes, I think, from the trial that have been sticking with me.
One of which is, again, kind of in this early moment where he's kind of showing up, it's just him.
If you took a side-by-side of him on that first week showing up to court and then him on that last day, the ways that the pictures are composed are most completely different.
I don't know if you saw this little news tidbit, but at some point early on, maybe it was even during jury selection, he turned to one of his lawyers and he said, where are my supporters?
Why aren't my supporters allowed to come in here?
And of course I was like, oh, this is an actor asking for an audience, right?
Of course he's falling asleep if there's no one there who, no one who's there to see him, right?
Everybody else had been there to see the trial, to see the system in process, and now suddenly with, he wants people to be there, to be for him, right?
Not long after that, of course, what we get is the kind of like filing in of Rick Scott and J.D.
Vance and, you know, Eric's always there, but Eric's always there, right?
We get the filing in of all these people who are now supporters who then kind of take what he's saying and then they become I'll use a very particular religious term here, but they become his disciples.
And so they go out to the podium and that kind of thing, you know, and say the things that Trump's not able to say.
And that dynamic, too, for me, really rang true with evangelicals in 2016.
Uh, you know, there's the, you know, Trump gives that convocation at Liberty on Martin Luther King Day.
And Jerry Falwell says, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm not allowed to come out and, you know, endorse anybody here.
But then in the next week or the next two weeks, he's in Iowa, kind of literally stumping for Trump.
And this is, so I saw the same dynamic at work in the kind of political area there.
And I think one of the things to pay attention to now is how does, there's a really interesting dance that's happening about the constitution right now.
So if you, if you listen to him talk, he says, you know, I'm not going to stop fighting because I'm trying to protect our wonderful constitution, that kind of thing.
I was watching a couple things last night with some people who are kind of like around New Apostolic Reformation.
And one of the things that they're really talking about is like, is a constitution valid if the people who are underneath that are not valid?
And right.
And so this, again, I think gets to this whole idea of.
It's playing in a similar key as the kind of like, you know, the migrants are coming in, yada, yada, yada.
It's this whole question about like, who is allowed to be a U.S.
citizen?
Who is this country for and who it's not?
And I think that's going to be a really interesting thing to hear being played out as we continue through this, is that as he's being held up by a legal system, how he's going to try to divorce that from a constitution, right?
He's already doing it by saying, you know, the judge is conflicted, it's politically motivated, yada, yada, yada.
That's one way that he's doing it, but there's this other question about like who the Constitution is for and what the Constitution is about that I'm going to be really interested to see how the disciples in particular begin to play and figure that those ends out.
I want to, so I want to stay on the constitution and I want to ask you what you saw on telegram last night.
Cause I know you were on telegram looking at all the terrible things people were posting there, but let's, let's stay in the courtroom for a minute.
Cause you said something that I don't think I've heard anyone else say, and maybe I just missed it, but I really do think you, you, you said something that makes so much sense that I had never thought of, which is Trump sleeping in court.
Okay.
Is he just an old man?
Is he just tired?
I mean, I don't, I don't know.
I'm not, I'm 43.
If by the time I get to be 78, I'm going to take three naps a day.
So, okay.
Good for you.
I guess you want to take a nap.
But you're in court.
You're taking a nap.
Why?
Why?
And you hit it.
There's no audience.
And this is not about him.
Like, what?
When was the last time Donald Trump walked in a room and he didn't direct the whole proceedings?
He wasn't in charge.
He didn't get to be in front.
He didn't get to be center.
It's, as you just said, courtrooms and so many other parts of democracy are boring.
You gotta go through so many procedural steps, right?
You gotta, the jury gets to be sat, and the judge does this, there's reading, there's recitation, there's the lawyer, and like, it's like a graduation ceremony.
Everyone's going to graduation this time of year, and like, you go see your nephew graduate, and like, for two minutes, you know, you're like cheering for the nephew, and you're so stoked, and then the rest of the five hours, you're like, oh boy.
You know, the speech was kind of so-so, and the music was so-so, and let's, can't wait to go to dinner, because I'm hungry, right?
That was Donald Trump at the trial.
And then you're right.
All the acolytes show up and they're all dressed like him.
And you got to think, I've never sort of put these pieces together, Hank, but you got to think there was just a lot of like, get people down here, get me an audience.
And I want to ask you this question before we go to the Constitution.
That has to be when the outside of the courtroom turned into the theater of Trump.
Right?
Because outside, after week one, it wasn't like he walked out and went home.
It was, oh, look, Mike Johnson, Rick Scott, J.D.
Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Lauren Boebert.
They're all here, and there's a theater, there's a performance, and Trump's directing it.
I mean, does that make sense in terms of everything we're talking about?
It does.
I keep thinking about the Masha Gessen's, what is it, rules for surviving autocracy.
She has the, or excuse me, they have that rule, which is your institutions will not save you, and that is exactly the moment that I keep thinking about is that moment when the institution stops being the thing.
And you were gesturing at this earlier, and I think it draws, you know, it bears drawing out.
The political question is now no longer, if it ever was, Joe Biden or Donald Trump or whatever your other candidate is.
The political question is, do you want law?
That's the question, and it's a pretty stark question, I think, at this point.
It really is.
So let's just hover on the Constitution, and then I want to get to Telegram.
So you said the Constitution's in question, right?
There's a weird dynamic with the Constitution.
The authority of the constitution.
Now I'm old enough to remember like six months ago when Trump said, let's suspend the constitution so that I can be president because I should be president.
So y'all out there, you can Google that.
You, we talked about it on the show.
He said, let's suspend the constitution.
So I think, you know, let's not forget that part.
Okay.
But the way my brain is, is sort of processing this Hank is Trump is like the constitution comes into the theater with me.
I direct it.
I hold it on stage like I'm King Lear or like I am some other main character.
I hold the Constitution and I do with it what I want because I am Trump in the theater of Trump, the director, the actor, the audience.
Now America?
You get inside this theater and I'll tell you what I, we will all, right, within these walls decide what the Constitution is and what it does and what it says and how it should be administered.
That to me is the way MAGA World is thinking of the Constitution.
The rest of us are thinking of it as no one is above the law.
The Constitution holds everyone accountable, including the president.
And having a constitution means we don't have a king who is above the law, but we have a law which is the king.
And that means democracy functions.
So I'm wondering if, you know, what else is going through your head about the Constitution as we think about it in these terms?
So if I can make just a quick plug about why it's really important to understand performance in this, because I think you're articulating it really well.
I think a lot of times we get to the idea of performance and we think about it as it's got a negative connotation to it, let's say.
And I think, like, it's one of the things that Trump's lawyers really tried to turn on Stormy Daniels is that, you know, to kind of paint her as, you know, an actor who's out for the celebrity.
You know, we've never heard that story before, right?
The, what performance does is because performance has to have an externality to it, it has to try to communicate something to somebody who doesn't know what it is.
But at the same point of doing it, it crystallizes some sort of meaning, some sort of intention, right?
And so in thinking about something like the Constitution, I'm really, again, kind of paying attention to This, the myriad ways that people are referring to it, right?
When Trump says suspend the Constitution, he's talking about a different Constitution than he is when he's saying he's defending it.
And what's the difference between those two things?
Well, the difference is, who is the Constitution for, right?
Who is the Constitution created for?
When he's saying suspend the Constitution, he's saying, I'm going to kind of like stop this and in favor of a higher law.
When he's saying he's protecting it, what's he saying that he's protecting it from?
And it bears listening to a little bit about who he's calling migrants coming into the country now.
So today he said they're people from all over the world, and he listed essentially every continent except for Antarctica.
I watched a little bit of Sean Hannity last night, and he made a very similar claim that the people who are coming in now are coming in from China and some other places, which are not people that we generally think about with migration.
So on the one hand, I was like, well, they're clearly courting the Latino vote.
OK.
On the other hand, I was like, wow, US isolation is becoming really, really isolated if it's being drawn that far.
And this is my This is my fear about something like Christian nationalism, is the ways that Christian nationalism really define who is the us and who is the them.
And I think that there's a lot of questions now about how Christian nationalism and who is the good of the Constitution for the ways that that's going to play itself out.
All right, y'all, that'll do it for this version of the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
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