MAGA World Knows Who’s Really to Blame for the Trump Verdict (2024)

Just a few minutes after the judge for New York v. Donald Trump told those in his courtroom they could leave for the day, the jury members came back and informed Justice Juan Merchan that, actually, they’d already come to a verdict. And Fox News was ready for this moment. Your World With Neil Cavuto directed its camera to the empty front doors of the Manhattan Criminal Court, and Cavuto asked contributor Francey Hakes what she thought. Although she acknowledged that the verdict was “probably not for the president,” she further noted that “it’s difficult to know what the jury is going to do in an extraordinary case like this, where there’s so much unconstitutional thumb-on-the-scale by the judge and bringing charges by a district attorney that don’t make any legal or judicial sense.”

From there on out, the tenor of how MAGA world would react to the verdict—no matter where it landed—was determined. The judge, the case, the jury, and everything else was corrupt and criminal, and Donald Trump was not. “I’m very, very strongly hoping that the jury saw through the smoke and mirrors that the prosecution put forth, that—of course the jury doesn’t understand that the president’s Sixth Amendment were very severely and clearly violated in this case,” legal analyst Rebecca Rose Woodland chimed in on Fox. Over on Truth Social, Dinesh D’Souza “ReTruthed” Trump’s complaint (at 4:15 p.m.) about how his “CIVIL RIGHTS HAVE BEEN TOTALLY VIOLATED WITH THIS HIGHLY POLITICAL, UNCONSTITUTIONAL, AND ELECTION INTERFERING WITCH HUNT.” Meanwhile, Townhall.com put scare quotes around the word trial in its related headline. Rep. Elise Stefanik posted that she was “praying for President Trump and his family.” Donald Trump Jr. teased a forthcoming Rumble livestream about this “bogus, banana republic lawfare.”

So, of course, when the 34 guilty charges were read out just after 5 p.m., the MAGA-verse had its reactions ready to go. “Such bullsh*t,” moaned Trump Jr. on Truth Social. Catturd announced we were living in a “Post justice America” and bravely volunteered to “crawl through 10 miles of rattlesnakes now to vote for Trump.” Country artist Lee Greenwood began hawking his “God Bless the USA Bible” right away. D’Souza referred to the trial as a “sham.” Before Trump himself could even weigh in on the digital forum, accounts like the “Citizen Free Press” posted his IRL postverdict remarks, including his insistence that “this was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt. … I’m a very innocent man.”

The Donald himself posted after 5:30 p.m., naturally to share a Fox News clip in which former Bush administration official (and torture apologist) John Yoo lamented what the result could mean for “the presidency and our constitutional system” and wondered whether Republican state attorneys general should start persecuting Democrats.

Back on Fox News, former Judge Jeanine Pirro (who’s been in the courtroom for a bit of this trial) claimed that Trump—“the strongest man I’ve ever met”—had fallen victim to “a jury pool that was 80 percent or 90 percent anti-Trump.” Other panelists and hosts bemoaned a system that was allegedly stacked against Trump with a “Soros-backed judge” who was on the side of prosecutors in thrall to President Joe Biden. And yes, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is also “Soros-backed,” per Fox.

Tucker Carlson, sitting on X/Twitter in likely envy of his former newsroom colleagues, managed to make all this a part of his wildly racist “great replacement” theory: “Import the Third World, become the Third World. … He’ll win the election if he’s not killed first.”

A graphic again started traveling around Truth Social regarding alleged Democratic crimes that were never investigated even as Trump was indicted. (Yes, it includes the “illegal server” at “Clinton’s house.”) On the platform, Stefanik, Trump Jr., Kari Lake, Sen. Marco Rubio, Citizen Free Press, and Trump himself all shared links to the candidate’s WinRed donation page, which briefly crashed due to a flood of postverdict traffic (and you’d better believe that Fox News kept emphasizing this fact). Catturd predicted that Trump will now win 2024 in a Reaganlike landside. Trump lawyer Alina Habba called the court result an “atrocity” and asked followers to “pray for our nation,” while Trump adviser Kash Patel looked forward to Hunter Biden’s upcoming trial and asked Congress to subpoena the judge’s daughter.

The Biden campaign itself did not say anything on Truth Social about the verdict; its most recent post from Thursday featured an old clip of Omarosa confirming a now-Slate-confirmed scoop about Trump using anti-Black racial slurs behind the scenes of The Apprentice. According to the Wall Street Journal, the value of Trump Media’s stock plunged as the verdict was announced, and overall shares were down at least 6 percent during after-hours trading. Tough luck for the long-term bet on Trump’s electoral prowess.