It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the GOP gently sought to push Trump away from his attacks on those investigating him and let the process work.
But from the start, the temptation to hew to Trump’s narrative of corrupt law enforcement has been strong among Republicans. And as his legal problems mounted, they gave in to it. They hit the point of no return long ago.
Trump’s witch-hunt claims really took off, as it happens, when the FBI raided the offices of his then-lawyer Michael Cohen in April 2018. (Cohen is now a central figure in the Manhattan DA’s case.) Up to then, Republicans actually put up some resistance.
In May 2017, when Trump began calling special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe a “witch hunt,” Republicans balked.
“It’s not a witch hunt,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said flatly the next month.
“I don’t view it that way,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said.
“I don’t think it serves him well,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich said of a Trump witch-hunt tweet. “I don’t think that tweet helped him.”
In the months that followed, Republicans began to worry that the president might take action against Mueller similar to his firing of FBI Director James B. Comey. And so they played up the legitimacy of the probe and urged him to slow his roll.
“When you are innocent … act like it,” then-Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said. “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you should want the investigation to be as fulsome and thorough as possible.”
Other Republicans outwardly worried about the political and societal costs of attacking law enforcement and undermining the rule of law.
“Those are political cheap shots that sound good on Fox News, but in the real world are completely unfair to a guy who has given his life to serving this country,” then-Rep. Thomas J. Rooney (R-Fla.) said.
After Trump accused Mueller’s team of being “hardened Democrats,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) offered assurance that Mueller was “following the evidence where it takes him, and I think it’s very important he be allowed to do his job without interference.”
“And there are many Republicans who share my view,” Graham promised.
Not so much anymore. As with the Mar-a-Lago search, the GOP response to Trump’s indictment late Thursday was swift, absolute and left virtually no room for reevaluation once we actually see the charges and evidence. While the Democratic talking point was that nobody is “above the law,” Republicans labeled it a “witch hunt” and political interference in the 2024 election. And they linked it to their increasing — and often dubiously predicated — claims that the government has been “weaponized” against them. They indicated they’ll double down on probing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, even as the case is ongoing.
A few brave souls ventured that perhaps we should wait for actual details. (“I trust our legal system,” Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska told Axios. “President Trump will be able to make his defense and we’ll all see if this is a partisan prosecution or not.”) But that was very much the exception.
The siren song of this posture has long been evident. Even when congressional Republicans were shying away from the witch-hunt talk in 2017 and early 2018 and defending Mueller, their base was on board with Trump’s rhetoric. Within a month of Trump’s keying on this message in mid-2017, a poll showed that 74 percent of Republicans agreed the Russia investigation was a “witch hunt.” By January 2018, in another poll, that number hit 83 percent.
If you layer on Trump’s penchant for waltzing into legally problematic territory, you begin to see the attractiveness of the message. It allows his allies to skip over accounting for the actual details of his many legal issues and just throw a blanket over the entire thing. And the base and Fox News eat it up.
At that point, it no longer matters that 73 percent of Republicans say it’s a crime “to pay someone to remain silent about an issue that may affect the outcome of an election,” as Cohen did in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case — and for which Trump reimbursed Cohen. (The question didn’t mention Trump, perhaps leading to more unvarnished responses.) It doesn’t matter that a majority of the GOP base acknowledged the situation was at least unethical.
But it also commits you to a posture that doesn’t allow for the rule of law to actually work — the rule of law that Republicans once emphasized. It’s possible the Manhattan case is flimsy along with the untested legal theory that seems to be behind it. Americans are skeptical of the case, with a poll this week showing they say by a 62-to-32 margin that this is mostly about politics, rather than the law.
But we just don’t know yet. Right now we don’t even really know what the legal theory is.
And we’ve seen before how staking out this absolutist position from the jump can back you into a corner. As Republicans were deriding the Mar-a-Lago search in August, one GOP intelligence committee member stepped forward to caution that it might indeed be a “problem” if Trump had retained highly sensitive information on so-called special access programs.
It turned out the FBI did seize such information from Mar-a-Lago. But as we were learning the details, Republicans suddenly grew quiet. As in that case, we’ll find out how tenable their early posture in the Manhattan case is.
