Why do Bible-bashing Republicans love sinful Trump? Because he won’t do a Nixon (2024)

You might have missed it, but the US Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, appeared outside court on behalf of Donald Trump in New York City the other day. Johnson is an avowed evangelical Christian with performative hang-ups about sex: He once revealed, unappetisingly, that he and his son share an app on their phones that warns the other if one is using the device to look at p*rnography.

But that didn’t stop Johnson expressing his support for a man whom we all know had an adulterous assignation with a p*rn star – and was on trial specifically charged with covering up hush-money payments to her before the 2016 election.

Not too long ago, when scandals broke, cautious politicians backed slowly away from peers caught in an unwelcome spotlight. In recent years, it seems like the right in America has turned this all on its head. What gives?

The answer is a key philosophical precept of the goon squad mentality that has grown up around Donald Trump. He was mentored by a New York lawyer named Roy Cohn. Cohn is a notorious figure in American political history. He was an adjutant to Senator Joe McCarthy, the demagogue who used a blizzard of untruths and smears to catalyse the notorious anti-communist blacklists of the 1950s, which ruined the lives of so many Americans.

Cohn went on to a lot of other unsavoury legal work (representing mobsters and creeps) and was finally disbarred. (His legacy is such that he was turned into a malevolent figure in the epic stage creation Angels in America.)

Richard Nixon, who got his start watching McCarthy and Cohn in action, is a hero to this crew. His only mistake? Resigning. Their clarion call: Never give up, never back down, never admit you’re wrong. Instead, go on the attack and don’t let up.

This, of course, isn’t limited to the right. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s steadfast and ridiculous denials of involvement with Monica Lewinsky were obviously taken from this playbook. But Trump, with freaks like Roger Stone (who has an outlandish tattoo of Nixon on his back) and the dishevelled soon-to-be-inmate Steve Bannon telling him never to back down, has turned it into the most important force in the fight for his political life (and, perhaps, personal freedom).

You can see it in action everywhere. After the January 6 attacks, just about everyone on the right, Trump included, condemned the violence and outrages that occurred during the attacks. Then the ghost of Roy Cohn started whispering in Trump’s ear. Today, the rioters are heroes and those imprisoned for violent acts against police officers “hostages”. Never concede, always attack.

That’s what brought about the spectacle outside the courtroom in New York this week. It wasn’t just Mike Johnson. A crew of sycophants and wannabe veep choices were there too, including Doug Burgum, the multimillionaire governor of North Dakota; J D Vance, the increasingly shrill senator from Ohio, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur who managed to make himself the single most disliked member of the 2024 Republican presidential field.

They weren’t there because they liked Trump. And they weren’t abashed to be standing at the figurative side of a man charged with so many sordid deeds. They were there because they have now bought in to the game plan. Fight back at all costs.

This is often derided on the left as cynical – and of course it is. Bannon, Stone and Trump are laughing at the rubes that believe their lies. But it’s actually just a workable hard-nosed political tactic – if you have the stomach for it.

The MAGA mediasphere helps, of course. Trump’s denials and obfuscations, even in the face of plain facts to the contrary, get disseminated and even enhanced on America’s right-wing radio and web networks and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. The tactic also has the benefit of just testing the exhaustion limits of the other side – or the voting public generally.

But there’s a downside. Once the trial started, Trump’s vociferous and often vulgar denials of a liaison with Stormy Daniels, the p*rn star in question, forced his attorneys to echo that position in their opening arguments. Legal observers say this was a significant error by his defence team. That let the prosecutor bring Daniels to the stand to give her version of the events they were denying took place. Her account was, by all accounts, believable and convincing.

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There is, that is to say, a tactical element to this way of waging war that, over time, puts those who use it in ever more precarious positions.

Anything can happen in a New York City jury room, of course, but there are few reputable legal analysts saying that the prosecution, as it technically rested its case on Wednesday, hadn’t made a strong case against the former president. The one thing we know for sure is that if Trump is found guilty, none of these people are going to accept the verdict, and that Trump himself won’t either, even if he’s issuing his denials from a prison cell.

Bill Wyman is a former arts editor and assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.