Trump Struggles to Defend Himself in Bizarre Post-Arrest Speech
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After a day of historic indignity — spent getting booked and arraigned at a Manhattan courthouse — former president Donald Trump retreated to his safe space, Mar-a-Lago, where he delivered an embittered televised address to the nation.
Trump entered his ballroom to the strains of Lee Greenwood’s “I’m Proud to be an American.” The crowd chanted “USA! USA!” as he took the podium in front of a backdrop of American flags, ready to reassert himself after a day of powerlessness in court.
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But Trump’s delivery was drained as he rattled through an endless litany of conspiracy and complaint, not only about the day’s criminal proceedings but about the “onslaught of fraudulent investigations” he claims are unfairly targeting him, ranging from “Russia, Russia, Russia,” to the dual impeachment “hoaxes,” to the “boxes hoax” (his new term for his mishandling of classified documents at his Florida resort), to his “persecution” at the hands of New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump took advantage of the free air time to proclaim his innocence: “The only crime I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.”
A key purpose of Trump’s speech seemed to be priming his faithful for additional prosecutions that may soon be incoming. He blasted the “local racist” prosecutor in Georgia who is investigating his election interference in that state. (In an odd throwback to his impeachment over Ukraine, Trump characterized his haranguing of Georgia election officials as another “perfect phone call.”)
Similarly, Trump trashed the “radical-left lunatic bomb-thrower” Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped to lead federal investigations into his document scandal and his efforts to subvert the 2020 election.
And despite a caution from the judge in his Manhattan case to lower the temperature, Trump specifically lashed out at the New York jurist: “I have a Trump-hating judge,” he insisted. He also bashed the Manhattan DA who just indicted him, calling him the “radical-left George Soros-backed prosecutor Alvin Bragg.”
Trump: I have Trump hating judge with a Trump hating wife and Trump hating family pic.twitter.com/PyAXCWn3mv
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 5, 2023
Throughout his campaign-style speech — in which he name checked the “Hunter Biden laptop from hell” and wove in references to Hillary Clinton’s emails — Trump spun a narrative that he, instead of being the perpetrator of a crime, is now a conservative martyr, subject to baseless political slings and arrows.
To be clear: Trump today was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to illegally cover up a hush money payment to a porn star who alleges she carried on an affair with him beginning in 2006, shortly after the birth of his fifth child to his third wife.
Trump, the charging documents assert, cheated in the 2016 election — orchestrating a payment to Daniels to prevent an explosive story from coming to light that October — and then cheated through his business accounting to cover it up. Trump even used a White House meeting in the Oval Office to shore up the particulars of the crime. Trump’s fixer in this case, his former attorney Michael Cohen, has already served federal prison time for his role in the scheme, and the new charging documents insist that Cohen acted at Trump’s explicit direction.
But from Trump’s perspective, he is blameless.
During his Mar-a-Lago address, Trump insisted, “There’s no case. There’s no case!” Retreating into projection, Trump claimed the prosecutor was the one who should be on trial: “The criminal is the district attorney,” Trump insisted, alleging that Bragg “illegally leaked grand jury information” and should resign.
Cutting his speech short after just half an hour, Trump seemed absorbed by the trauma of the day’s events. When he railed against the “cripled economy,” the shame of the Afghanistan withdrawal, and a nation “going to hell,” he seemed lost in the darkness, a lonely troubled man sunk in his own emotional well. He wants Americans to make him president again.
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