Transcript: Trump’s Rage Over His Sentencing Takes Dark, Ominous Turn

Gurri: This is one more step in the long term project of delegitimizing all of the barriers to him personally doing whatever he wants in office. During the pandemic, we saw this a lot. He wanted every state government to follow the beat of his drum too. And where they didn’t, he was mobilizing his people. Do you remember he said liberate Wisconsin? He was tweeting to liberate Wisconsin and things like that. This is similar. He already has been spending the past few years, especially since he’s been facing legal problems, stoking up his base against the legal system—obviously, most famously, he stoked them up against the legitimacy of the 2020 election result. He’s continuing to feed this narrative to the people that are most personally attached to him that any aspect of the system that is a speed bump to him or acts against him in any way is illegitimate. It’s undemocratic, it’s corrupt, it’s evil. And you cast in those terms. In other systems, we see that one of the ways that personalists consolidate their power is through corruption charges. In China, for example, Xi has had many anti-corruption campaigns that were just pure campaigns to purge political rivals.

Sargent: Maggie Haberman of The New York Times said on CNN the other day that Trump is very angry about the hush money conviction and sentencing, and that he may want a display of fighting the sentencing in court. He’ll see this as politically useful, she suggested. I think that’s a dark and ominous turn in his anger as well. You wrote that the personalist ruler seeks to expand his charismatic authority through big public gestures of various kinds. And this fighting display is another signal that he’s going to try to mobilize his supporters against the system on his own behalf. Is that the right way to read this?

Gurri: Trump has promised a lot of very big, extreme things over the last year. Most prominently, I would say, deporting 20 million people—there’s simply no way that in our system as it’s currently constituted that would be logistically possible. So in order to get there, he’s going to need to get a lot more compliance from people in a lot of political jurisdictions he doesn’t have direct power over. One way to do that is to mobilize his most motivated supporters out in the public to support him, to see any impediment to him as illegitimate. We see this with the post about the cases with Haberman’s analysis. This is a theater, a stage for him to show the corruption of the system to his supporters in order to delegitimize it in their eyes, to mobilize them in his defense politically.