Felon 34’s Death-Defying Trials

Decapitation, electrocution and expectoration are just a few of the emerging hazards.

Donald Trump has been spending a lot of time lately fantasizing about his own demise.

“Haul out the Guillotine!” he wrote in a fundraising appeal on Wednesday, asserting that his beheading is “the Sick Dream of every Trump-Deranged lunatic out there!” A second email added that “THEY WANT TO SENTENCE ME TO DEATH!” and warned that he would be terminated if his supporters didn’t give him money immediately: “If we fail to have a MASSIVE outpouring of patriotic support — right here, right now — they’ll TAKE ME OUT and move on to their real target: YOU!!”

This was the most alarmed Trump had been about his own well-being since Sunday, when he addressed a rally under the blazing Las Vegas sun. Dozens of his supporters required medical care and six were sent to the hospital because of the 110-degree heat, following a similar episode at a Trump event in Phoenix a few days earlier. But Trump’s greater concern was for himself. During planning for the event, “everybody was so worried yesterday about you, and they never mentioned me,” he complained to the crowd. “I’m up here sweating like a dog. ... I’m working my a-- off.”

Trump did assure his heat-exhausted supporters that people were on hand to “throw water” at them if they lost consciousness. “I don’t want anybody going on me,” he reasoned. “We need every voter. I don’t care about you, I just want your vote.” He then predicted: “See, now the press will take that and they’ll say, ‘He said a horrible thing.’”

Perish the thought.

In a sign that the heat had, in fact, gotten to him, the fatality-fascinated former president further imagined himself having to choose his manner of death aboard a battery-powered boat that was foundering. “What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?” he wondered aloud to the Vegas crowd. “Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?”

Without hesitation, Trump said he would choose death by battery — exactly the sort of cool thinking we need from a commander in chief when the heat is on.

Of all the potential means of his undoing that Trump has contemplated this week, decapitation seems the most likely. In MAGA world, losing one’s head is a frequent occupational hazard.

For example, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), speaking to the Nevada crowd before Trump took the stage, said his felony convictions relating to his payoff of an adult-film actress made him like Jesus Christ. “The Democrats and the fake news media want to constantly talk about ‘Oh, President Trump is a convicted felon,’” she said. “Well, you want to know something? The man that I worship is also a convicted felon, and he was murdered on a Roman cross.”

Then there was Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.), who previously wore a T-shirt featuring Trump’s mug shot to the State of the Union. After former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan, in an interview Tuesday with Fox News, called Trump “unfit for office” because he put himself “above the Constitution,” Nehls offered this reasoned critique to CNN’s Manu Raju: “Paul Ryan, you’re a piece of garbage. You’re a piece of garbage, and we should kick you out of the party. ... You’re spitting in the face of the leader of our party.”

Thus did Nehls identify yet another emerging hazard endangering Trump: expiration by expectoration.

While Trump has so far evaded hungry sharks, lethal batteries, desert heat and Paul Ryan’s saliva, one of his leading conspiracy theories has not been as lucky. His complaint about the “weaponized” Justice Department just suffered a head-on collision with reality.

Turn the crazy up to 11:

Trump and his GOP allies have been yammering for weeks about how his “rigged” trial, in a state court in New York, proved that a “corrupt” and “two-tiered” justice system is “weaponized” against Republicans. They suggested the fix was in with the Hunter Biden gun trial and that the jury in Delaware wouldn’t convict him. Then the jury convicted the president’s son on Tuesday and the Republicans’ conspiracy theorizing suffered a setback: Doesn’t the successful prosecution of Biden’s only living son show that the Biden Justice Department is doing the very opposite of weaponizing the rule of law?

But the contrary evidence only made Republicans more devoted to their conspiracy theory. The Trump campaign said the trial was “a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family.” Longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller took the younger Biden’s conviction as evidence that the “DOJ is running election interference for Joe Biden.” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said it was clear to him that Justice Department “officials continue to cover for the Big Guy, Joe Biden.” On the House floor on Wednesday, Comer alleged that “President Biden’s Department of Justice appears to be taking every step to insulate him.”

Including, apparently, by successfully prosecuting his son.

But soon, the MAGA faithful had hatched a whole new conspiracy theory. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), on Fox Business, declared that Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict “creates an opening for Democrats to slip someone like Michelle Obama in here” as the Democratic presidential nominee, rather than Biden, he said.

Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo replied: “I am buying into what you’re saying there.”

So, Biden ordered the Justice Department to prosecute his son to create an excuse to decline the presidential nomination? That one is so crazy, it must be true!

The craziness resumed Thursday morning when almost all congressional Republicans prostrated themselves en masse before Trump. The former president was returning to the scene of the crime — Capitol Hill — for the first time since he tried to get the Secret Service to take him there during the 2021 riot. House Republicans postponed the day’s hearings by an hour so they could adore Trump at their Capitol Hill Club. They sang him “Happy Birthday” a day before his 78th and gave him a bat and ball from the Congressional Baseball Game. In the private meeting, according to leaked accounts, they listened to Trump call the Justice Department “dirty, no-good bastards,” bash Milwaukee, host of next month’s Republican convention, as a “horrible city,” attack Republicans who voted to impeach him and (according to Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman) recount a bizarre, disputed anecdote in which he said Nancy Pelosi’s daughter told him that he and the former speaker would make a a perfect couple.

Emerging from the session, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced that, “in many ways, President Trump has become a symbol of ... pushing back against corruption, the deep state, the weaponization of the judicial system, and that’s a very encouraging development.” Johnson endorsed legislation that would give Trump the ability to move the election case against him in Georgia to a federal court. After that will likely come attempts to defund the Justice Department to shut down Jack Smith’s prosecutions of Trump.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee departed the session with Trump so they could open a hearing to attack Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg, who brought the hush money case. Their first witness, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, went right to yet another conspiracy theory, blaming progressive billionaire George Soros for the “corrupt prosecution” of Trump. “The left hates President Trump more than they love this country,” Bailey testified, alleging “moral depravity” — not against the guy who paid hush money to a porn star but against those who prosecuted him.

At the very least, a certain measure of moral relativism was at play this past week. The day after the Hunter Biden guilty verdict, undeterred House Republicans pressed ahead with holding the man at the top of the “weaponized” Justice Department, Attorney General Merrick Garland, in contempt of Congress for protecting the president. Specifically, they faulted him for “failure to comply” with a Judiciary Committee subpoena demanding the audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, even though the Justice Department already released the transcript.

Leading the debate on the House floor for Republicans? Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who received a duly issued subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee two years ago — and never complied.

Another of Trump’s standard attacks suffered an unwelcome clash with reality this past week: his constant bashing of the United States as a “failed nation” and a “very sick country,” with an economy on the verge of collapse, its streets overtaken by criminals and its borders overrun by thugs and terrorists.

“We’re a declining nation. We’re a nation that is being laughed at,” he said after meeting with Senate Republicans on Thursday afternoon. He said the United States “is not special right now” and is “a bad example of democracy," with “inflation that’s killing everybody."

But Trump’s anti-American trash talk was refuted by a raft of new evidence. The World Bank issued a report saying “the U.S. economy, in particular, has shown impressive resilience. ... U.S. dynamism, in fact, is one reason the global economy enjoys some upside potential over the next two years.” Inflation in the United States slowed to a better-than-expected 3.3 percent last month. The U.S. economy added 272,000 jobs last month, also better than expected, with wage growth outpacing inflation over the past year. This followed data showing that U.S.-Mexico border crossings are down 50 percent from their highs late last year, and that violent crime plunged in the first part of the year, with the murder rate dropping by 26.4 percent. For all of Trump’s doomsaying about an imaginary “green new deal” crippling America, the country is producing record levels of energy and more crude oil than any other country has produced in history. Stock market indexes have been at record highs.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) had it right when he told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki this week that Trump should “stop s--- talking America.”

But the excrement keeps flowing. At Trump’s Las Vegas rally, Trump repeated his view that Biden’s executive order tightening border enforcement was “bulls---.”

“Bulls---!” the audience chanted. “Bulls---!”

“This word seems to be catching on,” a pleased Trump observed.

Next, he encouraged his supporters to react to his various indictments.

“Bulls---!” they chanted again. “Bulls---!”

Trump went on to say that the people responsible for his teleprompter did “a s---ty job,” that special counsel Jack Smith is “dumb son of a b----.”

But the vulgarities ended when he mentioned those who attacked the Capitol in 2021. The insurrectionists, he said, are “warriors.”

This season’s much-hyped reality show, The Apprentice: Vice President, has been a disappointing product. Trump has decided to have aspirants campaign publicly for the job (he says there are “a lot of great people running for vice president”), which has led one after the other to debase themselves.

This week, contestant J.D. Vance told Fox News that he is being vetted for the job by the Trump campaign, which asked the senator from Ohio questions like Have you committed a crime? and Have you ever lied?

Evidently, applicants will need to answer yes to at least one of those questions to be successful.

Though the VP contestants cannot hope to equal Trump’s record of 34 felony convictions, they have obligingly embraced versions of the “big lie” about the 2020 election and refusals to commit to honor the results of the 2024 election if their guy doesn’t win.

Contestant Marco Rubio has spouted a number of big-lie falsehoods, including the fiction that voters were paid. The senator from Florida imitated Trump by calling Biden “a demented man propped up by wicked & deranged people willing to destroy our country.”

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), another contestant, upstaged Rubio by waxing nostalgic for the segregation era. “You see, during Jim Crow, the Black family was together,” said Donalds, who is Black.

To date, Vance has arguably demeaned himself the most, making the pilgrimage to Trump’s trial last month, then tweeting on Wednesday that the former president’s son Donald Trump Jr. “is one of the best people I’ve met in politics.” Vance led a group of six far-right senators that announced on Thursday that they would bottle up the confirmations of any Biden “nominees who have suggested the Trump prosecutions were reasonable, endorsed President Trump’s guilt in these sham proceedings ... or supported lawfare or censorship in other ways.”

If sycophancy is the measure, Vance is clearly the leading contestant. But there are several more episodes to come.

Opinion by Dana Milbank

Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His new book is “The Destructionists: The 25-Year Crackup of the Republican Party” (Doubleday)