If Republicans had any hope of Donald Trump tempering his hard-line rhetoric in an effort to win back more moderate voters he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, his post-conviction messaging shows he may be unwilling to do so. | Rick Scuteri/AP
Published June 8, 2024
The former president is intensifying his post-conviction rhetoric, even as a majority of Americans say he got a fair trial.
In the days since his criminal conviction in New York, Donald Trump has warned that placing him under house arrest would push America to a “breaking point.” He has suggested that if reelected, he could try to prosecute his political enemies. “Revenge,” he said, “can be justified.”
And at a rally in Arizona on Thursday, the former president declared that if he is unable to overturn his guilty verdict on appeal, “we are not going to have a country anymore.”
If Republicans had any hope of Trump tempering his hard-line rhetoric in an effort to win back more moderate voters he lost to Joe Biden in 2020 — something more traditionalist Republicans have pushed for — his post-conviction messaging shows the former president may be unwilling to do so.
“The former president is never going to get away from those components of his rhetoric,” said John Watson, a former Georgia Republican Party chair. “He has made a decision that this is how he wants to litigate this election.”
Watson’s “only encouragement is that there is a pivot, and he again talks about those issues that are going to decide, in the minds of the electorate, which person they choose is best to lead the country forward.”
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SOURCE: www.politico.com
RELATED: Trump, in his first post-trial rally, demands that appeals courts reverse his felony conviction
Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail Thursday with a trip to Arizona, his first appearance in a battleground state since he was convicted in a hush money scandal. (AP video by Ty O’Neil/AP produced by Javier Arciga)
Published June 7, 2024
PHOENIX (AP) — Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail Thursday with a trip to Arizona, his first appearance in a battleground state since he was convicted in a hush money scandal, repeating his critiques of the case against him as politically motivated and calling for his conviction to be overturned on appeal.
“Those appellate courts have to step up and straighten things out or we’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said at a Phoenix town hall organized by Turning Point, a conservative youth organization that has seen its influence rise alongside Trump’s takeover of the GOP.
Trump is expected to appeal last month’s conviction on all 34 charges in his New York hush money trial, in which he became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes. He responded defiantly to the verdict against him a day after a New York jury found him guilty last week of a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor but had not spoken directly to the swing-state voters who will decide the November election until Thursday, when he used a profanity to decry the “fake” and politically motivated case against him.
