After Gov. Tim Walz joined the Democrats’ 2024 ticket this week, Donald Trump’s campaign team wasted little time in targeting the Minnesotan with attacks that appeared pre-packaged. One part of the offensive, however, stood out.
Walz, Team Trump told voters, has a record of “embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote.”
Putting aside the fact that the governor did, in fact, restore voting rights for formerly incarcerated people — a popular and just position — the line of attack flunked a rather obvious test of self-awareness: A jury recently found the former president guilty of 34 felonies. The press release from Team Trump was intended to make it seem as if Walz has somehow been soft on criminals, which might’ve been more sensible if Trump weren’t already a criminal.
Thursday morning — just two days after extensive coverage of his campaign’s misstep on Monday — the former president made the same self-defeating mistake. In a message published to his social media platform, Trump wrote:
“We are living in a Pro Criminal Atmosphere. It will end on November 5th.”
This was not an isolated comment. The GOP candidate recently declared with confidence at a public event, “You’re not going to teach a criminal not to be a criminal,” as if the maxim were just common sense. A day later, the former president echoed the line at an unrelated event.
“A criminal is a criminal,” the Republican nominee said. “They generally stay a criminal, and we do not have time to figure it out.”
This need not be complicated. A jury recently found Trump guilty of 34 felonies. This is not to be confused with a different jury finding Trump liable for sexual abuse, or the case in which a court found that Trump oversaw a business that engaged in systemic fraud.
He’s also still facing several dozen other pending felony counts, across multiple jurisdictions.
If it’s effectively impossible to “teach a criminal not to be a criminal,” he should probably drop out of the 2024 race immediately. What’s more, the former president has also surrounded himself with other criminals. “With Lincoln, they had a team of rivals,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley recently noted. “With Trump, you have a team of felons.” In case that weren’t quite enough, during his failed presidency, Trump had a habit of issuing scandalous pardons to politically aligned criminals, and if elected to a second term, the Republican has promised to issue even more pardons to politically aligned criminals — including those who violently clashed with police officers. If Trump is looking for evidence of an actual “pro-criminal atmosphere,” he can actually find one in his own political operation. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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