It’s kind to show up in court for a friend. But Missouri Rs in NY were still wrong | Opinion

It’s a kindness to show up in court to support an allegedly felonious friend. If someone I loved were on trial, I’d be there even if I thought I should soon be visiting that person in prison.

The blue suit and red tie uniform that most Republican officeholders — including at least two Missourians, U.S. Rep. Eric Burlison and U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt — have worn to Donald Trump’s New York election fraud trial has, as intended, telegraphed unconditional loyalty to the jury they care most about, which is the accused and his voters.

Is that a problem? At a murder trial I covered a dozen years ago, the judge ruled that those who had come to court to stand with the victim, Yeardley Love, the University of Virginia lacrosse player George Huguely V was later found guilty of having killed, had to leave the “Love” bracelets and anything else with her name on it at home. You know, because a display like that might prejudice the real jury.

So rows and rows of women seated in that courtroom in Charlottesville found another way to do the same thing. They showed up in pink for jury selection, turquoise for opening arguments and slate gray the following day. I’m not going to claim that I thought this was terrible, because I did not. At the time, I called this a particularly female form of dissent, but Trump’s red-tie brigade has proven me wrong about that. And for his defenders, of course, the former president is the victim.

What I can’t accept about their pilgrimage to New York, though, is the suggestion that whatever Donald Trump has done, he has done for America.

“I wanted to show moral support to a guy that deserves it,” Burlison told The Star. “I mean, look, a lot of people who have my same political view, a lot of conservatives see him as their fighter. He’s the one taking the punches for us.”

So it was for America’s sake that he had sex with someone other than the woman who was home nursing his newborn son? And then, two weeks before the 2016 election, paid her to stay quiet because he’s a fighter for us? Whether or not he’s found guilty of breaking campaign laws, that’s just ridiculous.

Jurors heard lengthy closing statements from both sides on Tuesday, and who knows what they’ll decide. It did seem to me that key prosecution witness Michael Cohen was caught in at least one damaging lie on the witness stand: Did Trump really tell him, during one specific call, to get the payment to Trump’s one-time sex partner Stormy Daniels handled ASAP?

Or was Cohen instead, as texts from that night suggested, calling Trump’s bodyguard to complain about some harassing calls from a kid? Both, Cohen testified, though earlier, he had remembered no harassing calls or kid. There is corroboration for most of what Cohen said on the stand. Yet I wouldn’t be surprised if he lost the jury right there.

And given Cohen’s history of lying both for his boss and for himself, I have no confidence that Trump will be convicted. Just as former Democratic Sen. John Edwards was not found guilty when he went on trial for his strikingly similar behavior during his 2008 presidential campaign.

In that case as in this one, both the defendant and the star government witness were accomplished liars. But not even Edwards, self-pitying as he was, dared to claim that he did it all for America. And with his political life over, nobody in his party came to his defense.

Burlison, Schmitt, House Speaker Mike Johnson and the rest of those desperately seeking eye contact with the defendant outside the New York courtroom are also asking us to believe that it’s because Trump is a fighter for us that he’s being prosecuted for refusing to return and lying about having already sent back files containing the most sensitive possible national security secrets.

Stowing these files in a bathroom of a club where foreign spies have been arrested and showing some to random visitors just to impress them benefits even one other American how, exactly?

Pressuring Georgia Republicans to find votes that did not exist and running a disinformation campaign intended to overturn an election were not patriotic but criminal acts. Fighting for us, no. Getting some of us fighting for him, yes.

We all saw in real time what happened on Jan. 6. But now we are being asked to believe that Trump, who had been told by his own top campaign and administration officials, and eventually by more than 60 courts, that he did not win the election, was somehow not trying to steal the thing by inciting a riot that he hoped would stop the peaceful transfer of power.

The insurrectionists who injured dozens of police officers, shouted for Mike Pence’s hanging and literally defecated on our democracy that day were fighting against us, whatever our politics.

It was, I will never forget, other Republicans who later told us about the attempted coup from the inside. But the few truly brave Republicans in Congress have since then either been voted out for telling the truth or else continue to flee in disgust.

Those who insist that Trump did any of this for anyone other than himself are not just showing up for a friend in trouble but standing against the rule of law. Some combination of fear, ambition and animus for those who oppose him even has them casting his lawbreaking pawns as heroes. And after decades of covering Republicans I so respected, that makes me sadder than I can say.