By Katty Kay -US Special Correspondent
Just minutes after he was found guilty on all 34 felony counts on Thursday, I heard from a person close to the former president who described this moment as a “civil war” within the Republican Party.
The historic nature of Trump’s criminal conviction is being leveraged by his campaign as a sort of roll-call vote to see which politicians will defend the former president and which of them will defend America’s legal system. It appears you can’t do both.
Larry Hogan, a moderate Republican who is running for an open Senate seat in liberal-leaning Maryland, took to social media to urge all Americans to “respect the verdict and the legal process”.
Within minutes, Chris LaCivita, a top official on Trump’s campaign, posted a crystal-clear reply to Mr Hogan: “You just ended your campaign.” The implication: if you’re not with us on this, you’re politically dead.
I asked a different Republican official who had worked on Trump’s last presidential campaign whether he agreed that this moment was a “civil war” for his party. He dismissed the idea. To him, it seems any war that once existed within his party was won long ago – by Donald Trump.
“Even if you don’t like Trump, he’s better than what we’ve got [in Joe Biden],” he said. “It’s an easy choice.”
And for now, it seems that the vast majority of Republican politicians agree with him – at least in public.
Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson said that Thursday was “a shameful day in American history” and that Trump’s conviction was “a purely political exercise, not a legal one.” Steve Scalise, another top Republican in Congress, said that America’s legal system was operating like a banana republic. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis compared the process to a “kangaroo court”.
But the fiercest defence of the former president may have come from Florida Senator Marco Rubio – who, back in 2016 when they were rivals for the Republican nomination, was one of Trump’s most vocal critics.
“This is a quintessential show trial,” Rubio said. “This is what you see in communist countries. This is what I grew up having people in the [Cuban exile] community tell me about. It happened in the days after the Castro revolution.”
Comparing America’s system of justice – with its independent juries and open trials and rule of law – to that of communist Cuba will stun many Americans. Mr Rubio isn’t just saying that these particular jurors made the wrong call in finding Trump guilty. He is going much further than that. He is making a full-blown denunciation of America’s legal system at large.
