Opinion | Republicans Have a Criminal They’d Like to Coddle

In the wake of Donald Trump’s felony conviction, Republicans are furious.

“Democrats cheered as they convicted the leader of the opposing party on ridiculous charges,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson. “This was a purely political exercise, not a legal one.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida agreed. “If the defendant were not Donald Trump, this case would never have been brought, the judge would have never issued similar rulings, and the jury would have never returned a guilty verdict,” he wrote on the website X.

Kari Lake, an Arizona Republican running for Senate, called the ruling “an outright mockery of the rule of law,” and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, currently vying to join the Trump ticket, said it was “Un-freaking-believable.”

Other Republicans aren’t just mad; they want revenge.

Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the former president, raged against the verdict on Fox News. “Every facet of Republican Party politics and power has to be used right now to go toe to toe with Marxism and beat these Communists,” he said, blasting Democrats with his preferred terms of abuse for political opponents.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who is also angling to ride with Trump as his running mate, slammed President Biden — who had nothing to do with the trial — as “a demented man propped up by wicked and deranged people willing to destroy our country to remain in power.” It was time, Rubio concluded, rendering the message with fire emojis rather than actual words, to “fight fire with fire.”

And in National Review, John Yoo, the legal architect of the George W. Bush administration’s torture program, urged Republicans to retaliate against Democratic elected officials. “In order to prevent the case against Trump from assuming a permanent place in the American political system, Republicans will have to bring charges against Democratic officers, even presidents,” Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote.