Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via AP
Michael van der Veen, lawyer for twice-impeached former President Donald Trump
Hey, if it worked with the Republican base, it’ll probably work with Republican senators.
That appeared to be the strategy of Donald Trump’s lawyers, who presented their defense of the former president on Friday. Rather than actually defend Trump against the charges he faces, they gave the senators Trumpian red meat. And whether because the Senators actually like the stuff or because they know that GOP diehards do, most of them swallowed it whole.
“This case is about political hatred,” said defense attoney Michael van der Veen, a newbie to Trump Land, but someone who has taken to the required demagogy like a shark to water. And no wonder: After years as a personal injury attorney in Philadelphia, he clearly realized that this was his one-shot audition to become a Fox News regular, and he was determined not to blow it. See him waving his finger at the House managers, asserting Democrats were the culprits behind the debasement of discourse. Watch him run clips of Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Maxine Waters, Johnny Depp and Madonna—scoundrels all—venting at the now-former president. Thrill to his evading the questions that Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney posed about why had Trump failed to stop the insurrection. Van der Veen delivered a defense of Trump that can only be termed as truly Trumpian.
So obediently did Trump’s attorneys heed their master’s voice that Bruce Castor, whom the defense has kept largely under wraps after his disastrous Tuesday performance, was sent out to offer a defense of Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
I’d term that defense a reductio ad absurdum of the overall Trump defense, if that overall defense wasn’t itself a reductio ad absurdum. Castor’s case consisted of reciting almost every sentence in the phone call in which Trump had used the verb “find,” thereby presumably demonstrating that there was nothing sinister in that monosyllabic word. He neglected to mention, however, the one sentence that all the hoo-hah is about: the sentence in which Trump asked Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” for him, which was one more than Biden’s margin of victory.
I can only imagine that Trump had told his boys to defend what he’d said on the call, because the Fulton County District Attorney has begun an investigation of Trump’s conduct.
To the extent that the lawyers made a case, it was that Trump’s speech on January 6th wasn’t really an incitement, because he voiced one sentence about being peaceful and because the Proud Boys and their ilk had planned violent action before Trump had started speaking. They ignored the House Managers’ very sound case that Trump’s incitement had begun even before the election, when he went from rally to rally saying that if he lost, it had to be due to fraud, and that he continued this Big Lie, virtually to the exclusion of everything else, after Biden defeated him.
If we are to believe Trump’s lawyers, the mob stormed the Capitol for their own reasons. I’ve seen no reports, however, that the Proud Boys or anyone else in the mob were gunning for Mike Pence, before Trump abruptly made him the cause of all his troubles just a couple of days before January 6, and attacked him 11 times in his speech on the Ellipse. If we are to believe the lawyers, there’s no explaining why the mob that ransacked the Capitol was repeatedly chanting “Fight for Trump!” and “Hang Mike Pence,” and erected a gallows for Pence upon hearing Trump’s 2:23 text (read to them by a rioter with a bullhorn) calling Pence a “coward” as they surged past the barricades. And there’s no explanation as to why a baker’s dozen rioters hauled into court across the country have said in their defense that they assembled at the Capitol at the request of Trump.
During the period in which senators questioned both the House managers and the Trump attorneys, queries from Republican senators whose vote could go either way (Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski and Romney) centered on Trump’s dereliction of duty in failing to bring the riot to a halt, and his continuing attacks on Pence even after the Senate chamber had been breached. These have emerged as the most difficult set of allegations for Trump’s lawyers to deal with. They routinely seek to explain away what Trump did through false equivalences to what Democrats do or through misconstruing the law. But it’s harder to explain away what Trump didn’t do to stop the insurrection, which is why van der Veen responded that if the managers had gathered more evidence, we’d have a clearer idea of what Trump did. Never mind that we have a very clear idea of what he didn’t do.
Both teams of lawyers were represented today by just some of their attorneys, and on the House Manager side, the professor of Constitutional law (Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland) and his onetime prize pupil (Rep. Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands) were stellar. Plaskett’s presentations, both prepared and (in response to the senators’ questions) spontaneous, have been uniformly clear, forceful and eloquent. I know I’m not alone in not wanting Plaskett to recede into the obscurity that comes with representing a U.S. territory in Congress. The country and the Democrats need her. Those Democrats are now demanding that D.C. be made a state, and some favor statehood for Puerto Rico as well. That ain’t enough. Let’s make the Virgin Islands a state, too. Any electorate that chooses Plaskett to represent them is, like her, precisely what America needs.
