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Victor J. Blue

If last week is any guide, somewhere north of 2 million people tuned in to Jesse Watters’s prime-time show on Fox News on Monday night to hear him moan that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> was being tortured. That the treatment the former president was experiencing during his criminal trial in New York was equivalent to — or perhaps worse than? — that experienced by detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsletters/how-to-read-this-chart/?method=SURL&location=ART&initiative=CONTEXT" target=_blank>Subscribe to How to Read This Chart</a>, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, national columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more.

“Donald Trump, been on the move his whole life,” Watters told viewers after describing the purported leniency Democrats had offered those detainees. “Golf. Rallies. Movement. Action. Sunlight. Fresh air. Freedom. This isn’t lawfare. It’s torture.”

He played a clip of a podcast hosted by Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen — expected to testify against Trump in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/22/trump-hush-money-trial-charges/?itid=ap_philipbump" target=_blank>Manhattan hush money case</a> — and whimpered about how unfair it was.

“The star witness, who went to prison for lying,” Watters said, “is torturing Trump and bossing the judge around.”

Both of those things are, in fact, happening in equal measure when Cohen says things on his podcast. Which is to say that neither is happening at all, for obvious reasons.

But Watters was simply building to his central point: that the Manhattan case was simply a function of a personal vendetta against Trump and not, per his own interpretation of state statutes, a violation of the law.

“There’s nothing wrong with the nondisclosure agreement,” Watters told the camera. Then: “Can you believe the Democrats still can’t get over the 2016 election? It’s now a crime to beat Hillary.”

That was the text on the lower third of the screen, too: “IT’S NOW A CRIME TO BEAT HILLARY.”

We cannot assess in real time whether Watters believes the things he says or not. It seems hard to believe that an adult human might think that Trump’s having to spend a few hours in court a day as a result of a grand jury indicting him on criminal charges is akin to the torture with which “Democrats used to be obsessed,” in Watters’s telling. But Watters’s track record on comporting with reality is, to put it mildly, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/31/jesse-watters-joy-reid-biden/" target=_blank>mixed</a>. It is safe to assume, though, that he thinks this angle is the most effective one for both defending Trump and putting the left on its heels.

He’s not the only one to elevate this idea that Trump’s indictments derive solely from a desire for retribution among Democrats or from an interest in sidelining Trump during the campaign. (This complaint from Trump and others is itself <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/17/trump-court-campaign-schedule/" target=_blank>greatly exaggerated</a>, given Trump’s approach to campaigning.) But it (usually intentionally) conflates two things: Democratic dislike of Trump and <i>things Trump actually did</i>.

Trump, Watters and Republicans generally are heavily invested in either ignoring or downplaying that second part, but it’s the most important element here. Consider the first Trump impeachment, the one rooted in his efforts to leverage his office to pressure Ukraine into aiding his reelection bid. As soon as rumblings about his actions began to emerge, House Democrats seized on them, as they had with a number of other probes that ultimately didn’t go anywhere. But this one did — because there was lots of evidence Trump had done what he was accused of doing.

Contrast that with the effort by House Republicans to impeach <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/joe-biden-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">President Biden</a>. They, too, have a partisan desire to embarrass or hobble the president. What they don’t have is any significant evidence to prove their case (and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/26/biden-republicans-impeachment-inquiry-2023/?itid=ap_philipbump" target=_blank>not for lack of trying</a>). They had the dislike, but not the goods. So <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/23/biden-impeachment-republicans-smirnov/" target=_blank>that was that</a>.

Or consider the observation offered by an unnamed Trump administration official whose interview with the FBI was <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/22/politics/nauta-classified-documents-trump-pardon-second-term/index.html" target=_blank>made public</a> Monday. In November 2021, the official met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago to discuss the request from the government that the former president return documents he’d taken with him when he left the White House.

“Whatever you have, give everything back,” the official told Trump, according to a redacted summary of his interview with the Bureau. “Let them come here and get everything. Don’t give them a noble reason to indict you, because they will.”

In other words: They are looking for reasons to get you. Don’t give them one. (Trump offered a “weird ‘you’re the man’ type of response” to that advice, the official said.)

So are there reasons for Trump’s indictments? Sure. Trump’s attorney did pay $130,000 to an adult-film actress to keep her story quiet before the election, getting paid back in 2017. Trump did have documents marked as classified at Mar-a-Lago. He did try to block Joe Biden’s election victory. He did try to get officials in Georgia to overturn the election results in that state. Were those things criminal? Juries will decide — but he did them.

Trump is aided by another dynamic here: the willingness of his allies to reframe his dubious actions as innocent. Watters spent a healthy chunk of time trying to explain campaign finance law in a way that was favorable to Trump; it was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/22/trump-hush-money-trial-charges/?itid=ap_philipbump" target=_blank>not terribly convincing</a>. What it came down to, though, was that paying off adult-film actresses to bury stories of alleged affairs is simply par for the course for prominent individuals. A legal defense perhaps, but certainly not a moral one.

A few hours before Watters’s show, “Fox &amp; Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt <a href="https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1782423000379240527" target=_blank>dug a little deeper</a> on this idea.

“Does this set a precedent for other people who want to run for president?” she fretted. “What if they’ve done something like this in the past?” She offered a slippery-slope example: If someone “paid off a girl when they were 30 years old, then that was election interference.”

The short answer is no, of course: If you’re not actively a candidate, you’re not subject to campaign finance rules. But also, is Earhardt — who positions <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/ainsley-earhardt-fox-friends-faith-book-glad-you-were-born" target=_blank>her Christian faith</a> as a central element of her identity — really worried that guys who tried to cover up allegations of extramarital affairs with porn stars might be dissuaded from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/presidential-candidates-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">running for president</a>? That’s the concern? That this unacceptably narrows the field of possible leaders of the country?

Trump has long benefited from his allies excusing or downplaying his behavior and comments. Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of his wondering during a news conference whether we couldn’t inject light or disinfectant into people to combat the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a> — comments incorrectly distilled as his saying that people should inject bleach but fairly dismissed as unworkable and bizarre. Watters, like many others, has waved those comments away not by defending them but by criticizing the exaggerated criticisms of it.

For nearly nine years now, Trump has been the driving figure on the political right. Over that time, he and his allies have developed robust tactics for dismissing or sidelining criticism. We see them now deployed in a much more challenging context: against a criminal justice system that is predicated on distilling truth from fiction.

Watters’s tortured analogies might convince viewers to stick with Trump politically, but — thanks to Trump’s own actions — the criminal process will move forward regardless.

The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America

Ohio State University

Philip Bump is a Post columnist based in New York. He writes the newsletter <a href="https://wapo.st/3m3QTiy">How To Read This Chart</a> and is the author of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696653/the-aftermath-by-philip-bump/">The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America</a>.

Philip Bump

The indictments aren’t because Trump beat Clinton. It’s all the other stuff.

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