After he was indicted for the third time, Donald Trump reacted with his now-standard, twin-pronged approach: first, expressing outrage and denying the charges, and second, asking his many loyal supporters for money.
But the former US president, who faces four charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, also found defenders among rightwing media in America which has often fervently defended him, sometimes flying in the face of reality to do so.
In the minutes after the Trump indictment was filed in federal district court in Washington, conservative commentators rapidly scrambled to his defense. Rightwing pundits lined up to compare the charges to “criminalizing thoughts” and the dropping of “fifteen dozen” atomic bombs – and that was just on Fox News.
Rightwing TV channel Newsmax, which has drained some of Fox News’s audience in recent months, brought on Rudy Giuliani, an unnamed co-conspirator in Tuesday’s indictment, who railed for seven minutes about Hillary Clinton’s emails and Biden being a “crooked president”.
In America’s rightwing media ecosystem it was a largely united front. News outlets repeatedly pressed the idea that Trump’s free speech was being criminalized: that the former president had done nothing more than talk about the election being stolen.
The effort, perhaps deliberately, ignored prosecutors’ allegations that Trump had convened false slates of electors and attempted to block the certification of the election on January 6.
“This is like lawfare, they call it,” Jesse Watters, Fox News’s newly-installed prime-time host, railed in the moments after the indictment was announced. “Legal warfare. If this was political, this would be, like, a political war crime. This is overkill. This is political germ warfare. These are political war crimes. It’s an atrocity. It’s, like, not just dropping one atomic bomb, you drop 15 dozen.”
Those claims were made on Fox News’s The Five show, which Watters co-hosts. By the time he got to his 8pm show, he hadn’t calmed down.
Watters assembled a panel of experts, which included Alina Habba, a former Trump attorney who now works for Trump’s political action committee and Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law.
In the wake of the 2020 election Trump “did exactly what you would want a president to do”, Lara Trump said.
“He upheld and defended the constitution of the United States by trying to ensure that we indeed had a free and fair election. That was his whole goal, that’s what he wanted to ensure was going on,” she said.
“[And] what about his first amendment freedom of speech.”
Sean Hannity, a friend of Trump who was disciplined by Fox News in 2018 for appearing on stage at a Trump campaign rally, brought John Lauro, a Trump attorney, on to his 9pm show.
“This is the first time, in the history of the United States, that the justice department has weaponized and politicized political speech,” Lauro claimed.
Newsmax, meanwhile, went where Fox News – the channel recently settled a lawsuit after repeating the kind of claims that Giuliani lobs out incessantly – apparently feared to tread. The right-wing channel hauled on an emotional Giuliani, who referenced his own book as he criticized Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the indictment.
“You don’t get to violate people’s first amendment rights, Smith,” Giuliani said. “No matter who the hell you are, no matter how sick you are with Trump derangement syndrome.”
There were some calmer voices of dissent in conservative media. One anyway: the Wall Street Journal.
In an op-ed the editorial board of the Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, criticized Trump’s behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election, but worried that the indictment “potentially criminalizes many kinds of actions and statements by a president”.
“You don’t have to be a defender of Donald Trump to worry about where this will lead,” the editorial board wrote.
“It makes any future election challenges, however valid, legally vulnerable to a partisan prosecutor.”
Away from the non-rightwing media, the interpretation was largely covered in a sober fashion in the US. The mainstream newspapers New York Times and the Washington Post stuck to a undramatic descriptions of the charges, while ABC News reported on the “sweeping indictment” Trump faces – noting it was his third in the last four months.
None of that mattered among conservatives.
One America News Network pivoted to Hunter Biden – always a source of interest among right-wing news – with an OANN correspondent pushing an emerging conspiracy theory that the Trump indictment was timed to coincide with Biden Jr’s tax charges trial.
Elsewhere, a senior editor of the Blaze website suggested that the Republican-led House should force a government shutdown – which could see about 800,000 federal employees furloughed or forced to work without pay – in the hope that the case against Trump would collapse.
Perhaps the most berserk take, however, was the one pushed by Trump’s own campaign.
“The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes,” the campaign posted to Truth Social.
On a day when the rightwing media seemed willing to do and say anything to defend their man, none of them was willing to go as far as that.
