OJ Simpson decided he could make some “blood money”, as he called it, by writing a “hypothetical” book on the murders of his estranged wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman entitled If I Did It. When it was announced in 2006, the outrage was so overwhelming that the publisher, HarperCollins, owned by Rupert Murdoch, fired the editor, Judith Regan, and cancelled a scheduled Fox network special. The OJ book fiasco appeared to be a rare moment of Murdoch sensitivity, but he was concerned that the association besmirched his own reputation.
A week after Donald Trump’s attorney argued in the DC district court that he could not be prosecuted for his attempted coup culminating in the January 6 assault on the Capitol and could order the assassination of any opponent, Trump took to his Truth Social account on 18 January to insist that he “MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY” even for “EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE’”. If the glove fits, you must still acquit.
Trump’s If I Did It moment was followed, not with repulsion, but instead with his former warm embrace by Murdoch’s Fox News, reflexive bended knee by the entire Republican leadership, and Polonius-like advice from JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to Democrats to “grow up” and “listen” to Maga.
After 6 January 2021, Murdoch swore that Trump was an “asshole”, “a fucking idiot” and a “loser”. Fox News itself agreed to pay $787m to settle a case alleging that Fox News broadcast falsehoods to advance Trump’s lies about the Dominion Voting Systems company. The day after Trump’s OJ-like confession, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said: “He’s gone out of his way not to look back,” and “there’s a sereneness about him.” Fox’s Laura Ingraham urged Ron DeSantis “to step aside and endorse Trump”. Murdoch had touted DeSantis in his New York Post and on Fox, but he is now back to round-the-clock promotion of Trump, whom he appeared to privately wish dead: “This would all be solved if … ” If I Did It …
The day after the US Capitol attack in 2021, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase felt morally compelled to issue a formal corporate statement: “This is not who we are as a people or a country.” But at the Davos World Economic Forum last week, Dimon said that Democrats should “grow up”, “listen” to “Maga”, stop “scapegoating” Trump supporters, and “treat other people with respect”. “I think people should be a little more respectful of our fellow citizens.”
Wearing a Ukrainian flag pin in his lapel, but seemingly unaware of its meaning, Dimon remarked that Trump was “kind of right about Nato”. Trump, according to his national security adviser John Bolton, pledged to wreck Nato, and bluntly told European leaders that he would not honor the US treaty commitment to defend them if they were attacked.
After Trump’s Iowa romp and apparent unobstructed path to the Republican nomination, the corporate statesman, holding forth from the pinnacle of globalism, hedged. His studied ambivalence came a week after his bank reported that in 2023, under Joe Biden, its profits surged to its best year in its history. But Dimon still swiveled. “I have to be prepared for both. I will be prepared for both. We will deal with both.”
Dimon’s grave words after 6 January 2021 were from a discarded balance sheet: “Our elected leaders have a responsibility to call for an end to the violence, accept the results, and, as our democracy has for hundreds of years, support the peaceful transition of power.” His condescension against condescension against the Trumpetariat is risk management. But his hypocrisy is more than interest on his capital. His feigned empathy about Maga as an oppressed minority community garbles bits and pieces of the half-digested drivel of table talk of Republican billionaires with whom he breaks bread.
While Dimon and others at the Davos aerie considered the annual Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, which identified disinformation and misinformation from artificial intelligence as the greatest short-term threat to democracy, a Manhattan courtroom was hearing the second defamation case of the adjudicated rapist Trump against E Jean Carroll.
Carroll testified that she had been inundated with death threats from Trump supporters. Trump’s incitement against the judges and their staff overseeing his various trials has provoked constant death threats against them, and they are surrounded by security details. The jurors’ anonymity is closely guarded to protect their safety. Trump’s antics are deliberate tactics of intimidation and political base mobilization. The shadow of stochastic violence hangs over the justice system. Everyone under threat “listens” to Maga.
While Dimon suggested learning from Maga, Trump provided educational lessons in two courtrooms. In his New York trial for financial fraud, he broke the judge’s conditions that he should not to attack the court or use the forum to make a “campaign speech”. After the closing arguments, Trump raged in the court that the judge has an “agenda”, and that the trial is a “political witch hunt” and “a fraud on me”. Judge Arthur Engoron, who would probably have declared another defendant in contempt, told Trump’s attorney: “Control your client.”
At the E Jean Carroll trial, Trump interrupted Carroll’s lawyer repeatedly with loud remarks from the defendant’s table. Judge Lewis Kaplan staid that if he continued his disruptions he could be excluded from the courtroom.
“I would love it,” Trump replied.
“I know you would, because you just can’t control yourself in this circumstance, apparently. You just can’t,” Kaplan said.
“Neither can you,” Trump countered, using one of his favorite gambits – accusing the person calling him out for his actions of doing the same thing. (“Puppet, puppet, you’re the puppet,” he shouted at Hillary Clinton in a debate, to claim she was Putin’s plaything.)
During the lunch break in the trial, Trump posted a series of attacks on the judge, calling him a “seething and hostile Clinton-appointed Judge”. “He is abusive, rude, and obviously not impartial but, that’s the way this crooked system works!” Another defendant would have been held in contempt, subjected to a gag order, or excluded from the proceedings. His Maga followers were listening and watching.
Then, at a New Hampshire rally, on 20 January, Trump staged an Orwellian exercise in projection, appearing before a gigantic sign reading: “Biden Attacks Democracy.”
***
The very day of Trump’s cross-the-line If I Did It statement, the Republican congressional leaders en masse affixed their signatures to a document unprecedented in US political history. It was a declaration of unconditional surrender to Trump. In an amicus brief filed before the US supreme court in the case in which the Colorado supreme court ruled to remove Trump from the ballot for engaging in an insurrection under the constitution’s 14th amendment, section 3, they defended him as an innocent victim. To depict the guiltless Trump, they offered a story of alternative facts.
During the protests in the summer of 2020, he was the real target of violence: “Violence aimed towards the sitting President was perhaps unsurprising … ” Then, during the election, “both sides could attempt to label the other as having actively opposed the peaceful transfer of power to the rightful winner, or at least being morally complicit in those actions – and thus both Trump and Biden partisans could try to disqualify each other under Section 3, in tit-for-tat … ” But Trump on 6 January 2021 was the voice of peace and reason, telling his supporters to “go home now.”
The amicus brief that is the white flag raised by the congressional Republicans has been signed by 44 senators and 135 members of the House, all the leadership in both chambers. The signers are a confederacy of cynics and co-conspirators.
Of the senators, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee were almost certainly privy to far more of the “stop the steal” movement, the fake electors scheme and the events of January 6 than they have revealed. The Georgia grand jury recommended Graham’s indictment for election fraud, but he was let off the hook when the prosecutor opted not to charge him.
Of the House members, speaker Mike Johnson and Jim Jordan, among others, were extensively involved in Trump’s plot. Johnson, among other things, was central to organizing objections to certification of the electoral college count. Jordan refused to honor the subpoena of the January 6 committee.
“Leader Mitch McConnell” is listed on the amicus brief. On the day of January 6, McConnell was hustled by the Capitol police to a secure location, where with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer they frantically called for military intervention to end the assault. McConnell was in physical danger. He is frail. He has unstable balance. He cannot run. He had a bad fall the year before, fracturing his shoulder. He has heart trouble.
That evening, after the Capitol was cleared of the attackers, McConnell quaked with anger. “The mob was fed lies,” he said. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.” He told his staffers that Trump was a “despicable human being”.
He thought Trump was done. Now, McConnell has lent his name to a legal document that claims Trump did not “engage” in an insurrection.
***
The brief, prepared by a Federalist Society chop-shop of rightwing lawyers, provides an à la carte menu for the conservative majority on the US supreme court to select an excuse for Trump. There are the sophistries – the president is not an “officer” of the US; his oath differs by a word from that of a senator; Trump didn’t “engage in” an insurrection.
There is whataboutism – as in, what about antifa in Portland and Maxine Waters. There is twisted illogic – the falsehood that a state lacks power to disqualify a candidate because it “interferes” with the congressional authority to remove a “disability” through an amnesty.
There is constitutional nonsense – that the 14th amendment is not self-executing; that the qualification mentioned in the 20th amendment, the “lame-duck” amendment, that prevented a lame duck Congress from choosing a president and established the line of succession in case of an electoral deadlock or a death, had anything to do with the qualification regarding insurrection provided by the 14th amendment, section 3.
In its defense of Trump, the brief winds up conceding the entire case. Invoking the non sequitur of the 20th amendment, the lawyers argue it “confirms that a candidate may be elected President even if he is not qualified to hold the office”. Splitting hairs, they have beheaded Trump.
Finally, in an even weirder conclusion, they cite George Orwell’s 1984 to defend Trump as the victim of authoritarian tyranny. “It is hard to imagine an actual insurrectionist quickly asking for peace and encouraging disbandment. But once ‘engage in’ is defined so broadly, even significant countervailing evidence can simply be labeled as a ruse, as insufficient, or even as an implied recognition and praise of ongoing violence. Enterprising state officials, in other words, may conclude that ‘Peace means War.’ Cf. George Orwell, 1984.”
But, then, after all that, Trump demands immunity for “EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE” – If I Did It.
For McConnell, his fellow signers, and the Republicans racing to endorse Trump, the clock is striking thirteen.
Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist. He is a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
