Donald Trump was arraigned (again) today. There were no cameras allowed in the courtroom, so as soon as it was over, the reality TV show star turned former president found his spotlight.
After being warned by the judge not to speak to another witness or tamper with the jury or commit any crime or he may be imprisoned, Trump sought happier ground with the TV cameras.
Trump told the cameras, “This is a sad day for America and it was also very sad driving through Washington DC and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti. This is not the place that I left. It’s a very sad thing to see it. When you look at what’s happening, this is a persecution of a political opponent. This was never supposed to happen in America. This is the persecution of the person that’s leading by very, very substantial numbers in the Republican primary and leading Biden by a lot. So if you can’t beat him, you persecute them or you prosecute them and we can’t let this happen in America.”
Trump: This is a sad day for America and it was also very sad driving through Washington DC and seeing the filth and the decay… This is not the place that I left. pic.twitter.com/d17hKueG7s
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 3, 2023
Trump claimed that this was “persecution of a political opponent,” except that President Joe Biden is not prosecuting him, and indeed Trump has been indicted in New York on criminal charges and Georgia is expected to possibly bring down an indictment. Neither of those states are his political opponents.
When Trump and Republicans claim that Trump being held accountable for his own actions — actions, by the way, that included trying to disenfranchise American voters and defraud the U.S. government in an effort to steal the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden. — is somehow proof that he is being persecuted for being Biden’s opposition, this is pure projection, as we got into today in The Daily.
Donald Trump is the one who tried to extort Ukraine to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden because Trump was afraid he would lose to Biden otherwise. He did lose.
Now, and this is the most important part, President Joe Biden does not need to prosecute Trump to win an election. Biden has been busy his entire presidency actually DOING good things for the people and the economy has made an incredible recovery that is actually due to Biden’s policies (this isn’t always the case for a president).
It hurts Joe Biden to have Trump sucking up the oxygen with his many indictments and dramas, because it’s space that should be taken up with actual work that the Biden-Harris administration is doing. They are doing so much work that it’s impossible to keep up with, let alone for them to tout.
They are fighting a bumper sticker liar with stacks of books. Sadly in America, the bumper sticker often wins. So Trump being indicted again does not help Joe Biden.
And we must not lose focus on the fact that Trump has just been arraigned, finally, for something he did over two and a half years ago. Something that wounded this country to its core. Something that harmed the American people and caused further divide in this country.
Donald Trump has denied all wrongdoing and claims all indictments against him are the product of witch hunts.
Today’s arraignment is no one’s fault but Trump’s own. While the first arraignment of Trump was a sad day, a day that saw a former president make history in a bad way, today was not that day and the alleged crimes he is accused of committing are so egregious and harmful to the United States that there is no other way to see his arraignment but as hope that our votes still matter. Someone out there respects our votes and our rights to have our votes counted and not be terrorized when a candidate loses an election.
This is not a sad day for America; this is a glimmer of hope that our democracy is not dead and that some form of justice might actually apply to the former president.
Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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