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One accusation that you can never level at the contemporary Republican Party is "taking things in stride." Since former President Donald Trump's swift and unanimous conviction on 34 felony counts in Manhattan last Thursday, Republicans across the country, from pundits to presidential candidates, have absolutely lost their minds, promising revenge and retribution by prosecuting Democrats everywhere for... well, they'll get back to you about that. The thing they want you to know is that they will now use "lawfare" to prosecute Democrats for unnamed crimes as both retribution and deterrent. And just like what gets released into the atmosphere every time a flimsy MAGA balloon pops, it is mostly hot air.
Republicans want everyone to know that they are extremely angry about Trump's convictions. "It's time to fight fire with fire," wrote Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who also took the time to make absurd comparisons to communist show trials. Trump advisor Stephen Miller asked, "Is every Republican D.A. starting every investigation they need to right now?" Former Trump advisor Stephen Bannon—who is, notably, about to go to prison—also urged "dozens of ambitious backbencher state attorneys general and district attorneys" to "seize the day." (You might be wondering: what is a backbencher attorney general? Don't get hung up on the details! Just get mad and buy some Trump conviction merch!).
The takeaway is that they are so outraged by what they regard as politically motivated prosecutions that they are promising to engage in politically motivated prosecutions. Insert your favorite take on the goose and gander metaphor where appropriate. In the overheated imaginations of MAGA diehards, having random district attorneys in Texas invent criminal cases against Democrats will deter future Democrats from pursuing charges against Republicans who try to perpetrate coups in broad daylight. Unfortunately for them, more than eight years of threatening to prosecute leading Democrats from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama and now President Joe Biden has failed to alter Trump's basic legal trajectory, which was all but destined to end in felony convictions given his predilection for committing felonies. The best way for Republicans to avoid prosecution—as 99.99 percent of them somehow manage to do day after day—is not to commit crimes and then engage in sloppy after-the-fact cover-ups.
Another problem for this nationwide vengeance campaign is that elected Republicans in the House of Representatives haven't been able to get an impeachment inquiry off the ground despite years of furious digging into the Bidens' affairs. Despite an investigation that has lasted more than a year, Republicans knew they didn't have much of anything on the president, other than that his troubled son engaged in some influence-peddling years ago. They don't even have the votes for the kind of half-baked, party-line impeachment that they used against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. As proof of concept for what the far right would like to spend its time doing in the wake of Trump's convictions, it was a pretty embarrassing spectacle for its leading architects. Knowing that their impeachment quest is dead, outraged Republicans instead promised to obtain the recording of Biden's interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. The horror!
Livid Republicans also might want to take a minute to check in with members of their beloved hard-right Supreme Court supermajority, who are taking a break from getting wined, dined, and yachted by billionaires to determine whether presidents wield near-dictatorial powers that make them totally immune from prosecution, before and after they leave office. If Trump wins the election in November, he may very well find himself without any plausible options to retaliate against Joe Biden, even if he can convince some hapless goon to use the attorney general position for naked persecution. And almost any moves prior to the election by Republicans to frivolously prosecute other Democrats could be blunted on Biden's way out the door with his pardon powers.
Republicans should also consider the optics. Robust public opinion majorities in the United States support the investigations of Trump's efforts to the overthrow the American constitutional system of government in 2020-2021, and believe that his convictions in Manhattan last month were just and proper. Outside the MAGA echo chamber, there is no such groundswell of desire to investigate or prosecute Biden for the very simple reason that not even Trump's most subservient allies in the House could produce a plausible case. Voters are unlikely to approve of efforts by "backbencher attorneys general" to fabricate cases against Democratic officials, especially when Trump's allies are out there saying the quiet part out loud as usual.
The more that big, mad MAGA media misanthropes and their elected handmaidens talk explicitly about making up cases to persecute people, the less they will be able to focus on the handful of issues that are imperiling Biden's re-election prospects. Swing voters who are just starting to pay attention to this infernal election might not love what they are hearing from Republicans who seem more focused on retaliation than they are on solving problems.
They might just start asking themselves whether Donald Trump has a more coherent plan to bring down Joe Biden than he does to bring down grocery prices and then vote accordingly.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
