The temptation is to raillery. But how to satirize a political movement that appears to see self-parody as the highest form of expression? Costumed as if auditioning for a remake of the Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense,” a phalanx of Republican politicians showed up outside a New York courtroom wearing baggy blue suits and red ties, scowling and whining like the master.
The idea, one supposes, is to demonstrate solidarity with former President Donald J. Trump. Instead, the effect is to dramatize their subservience to a political cult.
Look, they’ve even got uniforms — mini-Trumps, every one!
House Speaker Mike Johnson, former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sens. Tim Scott, J.D. Vance and Tommy Tuberville — the former football coach — arrived in costume to repeat the kinds of calumnies against the judge, his family, witnesses and prosecutors that the defendant was forbidden from saying by a judicial gag order. The idea being to protect the integrity of court proceedings.
Johnson went so far as to attack Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter. (She has no role in the trial but works as a fundraiser for Democrats.) He denounced the proceedings as a “sham,” a diminutive copycat arguing the case against the former president shouldn’t even be tried.
On the following day, identically costumed Republicans including Rep. Matt Gaetz lined up behind Trump to denounce the judge, his family, the prosecutors and witnesses Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels — all supposedly protected from calumny by Merchan’s order.
Rep. Lauren Boebert, she of “Beetlejuice” fame — the Colorado congresswoman was ejected from a Denver theater for publicly groping a companion like a naughty teenager — did not wear a Trump costume, but she did declare “they may have gagged President Trump,” but “they didn’t gag the rest of us.”
Of course, Trump always had the right to testify in his own defense, but pretty much everybody understood that he would never do that, and everybody not wearing his trademark costume also understands why.
But let’s not quibble. The jury will return its verdict soon enough.
It’s the play-acting that’s the thing.
What are the chances that any of those mentioned above will honor the results of the November election if it does not go Trump’s way? I’d have to say that, at minimum, we’re in for an extended marionette show.
And should the GOP puppet-master actually prevail come November?
Greg Sargent put it this way in The New Republic: “If Trump does win, and he executes his vows to prosecute political opponents without cause, persecute untold numbers of ‘vermin’ who oppose him, stock the bureaucracy with slavish loyalists, convert our intelligence agencies into gangs of thuggish MAGA enforcers, and much more, does anyone doubt that many Republicans currently declaring quasi-absolute allegiance to him above our institutions will eagerly go along?”
The question answers itself.
Meanwhile, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene got busy reprising “Mean Girls” during a late-night congressional hearing. The Georgia congresswoman of “Jewish space lasers” fame took exception to a Democratic colleague’s point of order.
Specifically, Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett wanted to know what Merchan’s daughter had to do with Attorney General Merrick Garland, the ostensible topic of the hearing. Greene suggested that Crockett’s “fake eyelashes” were interfering with her reading comprehension.
At which point New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez moved to strike Greene’s words: “That is absolutely unacceptable! How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person!”
The official transcript documents the following exchange:
GREENE: Are your feelings hurt?
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Move her words down!
GREENE: Awww.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Oh! Girl, baby girl! Don’t even play!
GREENE: Baby girl? I don’t think so.
The lowest blow, however, was struck by Crockett, who reacted to a peacemaking ruling from the chair by asking, in feigned innocence, “to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleached-blond, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”
Game, set and match, Jasmine Crockett. Amazingly, Greene was silenced for a time, although she has since released workout videos for the stated purpose of displaying her womanly charms.
Meanwhile, how long before the Trumpist wing of the U.S. Supreme Court shows up for work not in judicial robes, but baggy blue suits and red ties?
Me, I’m so naive and unworldly I was actually shocked by that New York Times photo showing an upside-down U.S. flag flying outside Justice Samuel Alito’s home during the perilous interlude between the Jan. 6 attack upon the U.S. Capitol and Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 swearing-in.
If Alito had any character, he wouldn’t blame his wife — and he wouldn’t simply recuse, he’d resign.
Fat chance of that.
Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President.”
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