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The Gaping Hole at the Republican Convention

Trump’s vow of prosecutorial retaliation is largely absent from the convention — and opposed by some Republicans.

By ANKUSH KHARDORI

I was roaming the halls of the Republican convention this week when I came across Bob Bever, an affable attorney and delegate from Indiana who had no interest in locking up President Joe Biden — and thinks former President Donald Trump doesn’t really either.

“I think our country has been too engaged in these political prosecutions, and the more we can do to diminish it, the better,” Bever told me, while making clear that he took issue with the cases that had been brought against the former president. As for Trump’s proposed revenge tour, Bever said, “I think he’ll take the same position that he did with Hillary Clinton that says, ‘Let’s move on.’”

“I think a lot of that is political talk,” he added, before contemplating what it would be like if it actually came to pass. “I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

I had come to Milwaukee to take stock of the party’s appetite for one of Trump’s signature law enforcement initiatives for a second term — the unprecedented campaign of prosecutorial retaliation that he has vowed to undertake if he wins in November. The results were surprising.

After surveying delegates and attendees on the ground in Milwaukee and listening to the prime-time speeches, some clear themes emerged — namely, that Biden and his family are corrupt and that the criminal cases against Trump are all meritless, political hatchet jobs. That much appears to be taken as a given by the party faithful.

But there was much less unanimity on the question of what to do about it and in particular whether Trump’s proposed revenge campaign is a good — or perhaps even serious — idea, despite Trump’s own explicit promises on this front.

The criminal cases against Trump have served as background music throughout the week of the convention but haven’t been a major focus. Unlike in 2016, when “lock her up” was a favorite chant against Hillary Clinton at that year’s Republican convention, the 2024 discussion of legal retribution has been more muted.

It may be a sign of a more disciplined party apparatus looking to appeal to some moderates and independents. It would also fit with the GOP claims of a softer approach after the assassination attempt on Trump. The party’s rank and file, for their part, appear to be roughly divided on the issue as well.

It’s not clear whether Trump will tone down his talk of vengeance as the fall approaches. A central part of his post-2020 political persona is that he is a man who has been politically persecuted on behalf of his supporters.

Trump is both the first president to be convicted of a crime and the first convicted criminal to run for president as a major party nominee, and he is clearly not happy about it. He has repeatedly said over the course of the last year that if he returns to the White House, he will deploy the Justice Department to prosecute Biden and members of the Biden family along with other unspecified political opponents.

It’s true that he has done this before, telling audiences in 2016 that he would put Clinton in prison and then doing nothing of the sort. But this time, the stakes are higher and more personal, given both Trump’s newly minted status as a convicted felon and the fact that Biden’s Justice Department has been prosecuting Trump since last year.

Some Republican convention delegates may be taking Trump seriously but not literally when he talks of prosecuting his enemies. But make no mistake about it: The prospect is very real, and the list of targets is very long.

At one point during the convention, I came across a man with long, dark hair who was at first reluctant to talk — he would not give me his name, and indeed, several other delegates and attendees told me flat-out that they would not speak to anyone in the media — but he loosened up when I asked him what he made about Trump’s interest in prosecuting his political adversaries.

“I don’t even see that,” he told me, politely rejecting the premise of my question. Trump, he told me, “is just going to try to make America great again, in my opinion. He’s going to be so focused on doing the right thing that he’s not going to have time for any of that retaliation stuff that everybody’s talking about.”

He pointed to the attempted assassination of Trump last weekend. “I think he sees the world completely different right now,” he said.

That remains to be seen, but the public record of Trump’s promises to use law enforcement against his adversaries is indisputable.

The prosecutorial revenge campaign has been a recurring theme in Trump’s public appearances and social media posts since last year, when he was eventually indicted in four separate cases — twice by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith and separately by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. He was recently convicted in the Manhattan case of falsifying his company’s business records in order to conceal a hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election.

As the indictments piled up last year, Trump promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” along with everyone else “involved with the destruction of our elections, our borders, and our country itself.”

He has expressed interest in investigating and perhaps prosecuting Bragg and Willis, who filed a criminal case against Trump and others in Georgia based on his efforts to overturn the state’s election results in 2020. (The case has since hit a wall following revelations that Willis engaged in a romantic relationship with a prosecutor whom she hired to lead the case.)

Earlier this week, after Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents case against Trump in Florida brought by the Justice Department, Trump circled back to his supposed political persecution on social media: “The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.” (The post was later deleted.)

Trump’s allies in the media have been even more aggressive.

“Of course [Bragg] should be — and will be — jailed,” former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has said. “We’re coming after [Deputy Attorney General] Lisa Monaco, [Attorney General] Merrick Garland, the senior members of DOJ that have prosecuted President Trump. Jack Smith,” he has promised. (Bannon, of course, has a personal stake in the matter, given that he is currently serving a prison sentence after being convicted of contempt of Congress by the Justice Department.)

Mike Davis, the founder and president of the pro-Trump Article III Project and a self-proclaimed potential acting attorney general in a second Trump administration, has likewise been a vocal advocate for a raft of retaliatory political prosecutions.

Davis has said that Biden should be prosecuted based on his “illegal foreign corruption.” He has claimed that there “is a criminal conspiracy by these Democrat prosecutors, these Democrats judges, these Democrat witnesses, these Democrat operatives” to “violate President Trump’s civil rights” and those of his co-defendants. After I wrote a story about a series of off-the-record calls among some well known legal and political commentators, Davis described the participants as “Potential targets of the Trump 47 Justice Department’s criminal probe of Biden Democrats’ criminal conspiracy against Trump.”

As a practical matter, the notion that there would be such far-reaching criminal prosecutions in a second Trump term may seem fanciful, but the stated agenda is not up for much debate.

Ramdas Vaidyanathan, a pharmacist and GOP delegate from Washington state, was waiting quietly by himself off to the side of a book signing by the hard-line Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) when I asked if he was willing to speak with me. Sure, he said, as long as he could record the conversation too.

He was impressively conversant with the details of the criminal cases against Trump — at one point faulting the presiding judge in Trump’s Manhattan trial for refusing to allow a proposed defense expert witness to testify broadly about federal campaign finance law — and told me that he understood where Trump was coming from in his desire for some prosecutorial vengeance.

“They’re opening up the gate for the Republicans to look into what Democrats did. Earlier there was a lot of reluctance to actually go through with the ‘lock her up’ thing,” Vaidyanathan said. “Now it’s like, ‘Okay, you guys want to play this game? We can do it too.’ And that’s probably what’s going to happen.”

At the same time, Vaidyanathan suggested that Trump would do better to focus his Justice Department on corporate malefactors. “He needs to go after the people who really screw over America,” he said, and to move past the prosecutions against him.

“I think they should just move on, close all of this bullshit and just get back to fixing the bigger issues,” Vaidyanathan told me, but he hastened to add, perhaps improbably, that there would have to be “an agreement with the Democrats that they’re not going to pull this shit again.”

Other Republicans, however, were game for Biden to be prosecuted if he leaves office.

“Biden is a corrupt politician. Everybody knows. It’s common knowledge,” said Terrence Wall, a developer and Wisconsin delegate to the convention.

“The only way to hold politicians accountable is to get a new administration in there and take them to court and hold them accountable,” Wall continued. “You have the Democrats getting away with breaking the law, and you have Democrats then prosecuting Republicans for fake crimes that they didn’t commit just to keep the Republicans off guard.”

The theme of the convention on Tuesday was law enforcement — “Make America Safe Again” — which might have seemed like an opportune moment to address how Trump would respond to the allegedly cooked-up cases against him.

As it turned out, there were only scattered references and allusions to the matter, and they were focused on only the first half of Trump’s argument — that he has been unfairly persecuted — and not the second half, namely, that he should pursue a campaign of retaliatory prosecutions in response if he returns to the White House.

“They weaponize political power to target their political opponents like they’ve done to our nominee,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during his speech.

“They tried to put him in prison, and he’s freer — and has made other people free with him,” said Ben Carson, who served as Trump’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Lara Trump briefly mentioned Trump’s conviction in Manhattan — but she did so as part of a broader effort to humanize the former president. “I’ll never forget watching my two children running up to him with their drawings and hugs for grandpa,” she said, “just moments before he took the elevator down from Trump Tower to address the media the day after his wrongful conviction.”

Earlier in the night, during a short series of speeches about crime from “everyday Americans,” a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in New York complained about crime under Bragg. That brief reference produced perhaps the loudest boos of the night from the audience — an apparent recognition of Bragg’s prosecution of Trump on a night when the marquee speakers seemed to have gone to pains to avoid mentioning the name of the man who made Trump the first president in American history to become a convicted criminal.

By Wednesday night, Trump had the company of several other convicted criminals at the convention. Paul Manafort, who was convicted of various crimes stemming from Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation and later pardoned by Trump, was spotted on the convention floor.

Rod Blagojevich, the onetime Democratic governor of Illinois turned convicted felon and later Trump supporter, gave remarks at a “Serbs for Trump” event.

Peter Navarro, a former Trump White House aide who was convicted of contempt of Congress after refusing to comply with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee, took the main stage that night just hours after being released from prison in Miami. He gave a characteristically animated speech during which he complained about being wrongfully imprisoned by the Biden administration and corrupt judges, but he opted not to explicitly discuss Trump’s — and his own — interests in legally settling the score somehow in a second term.

JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, gave the keynote speech on Wednesday night, but he too conspicuously sidestepped the issue of Trump prosecuting his political enemies despite publicly — and at times awkwardly — supporting Trump’s position during his public audition for the vice presidential nod. Earlier this month, Vance endorsed Trump’s call for a special prosecutor to investigate Biden. He has also used the federal criminal charges against Trump to toy with the idea of prosecuting members of the media, requesting an investigation into a Washington Post writer that he knew would never happen but which would garner headlines nonetheless.

But that was then, and this is the general election campaign. And in the biggest speech of his life — the one that introduced him to millions of Americans for the first time — he avoided the topic of prosecuting Biden.

By now, several things about Trump as a political figure seem undeniable.

He collects grievances on an epic scale, and he does not forget the people who he believes have wronged him.

He enjoys revenge and excels at bringing his political enemies to heel — a skill that was on undeniable display as a series of onetime rivals, including not just DeSantis but Trump’s former Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, all took the stage to pledge their support to the man they once savaged in public remarks.

Trump has also at times adapted to political pressure from within the party, but if there were any doubt, the convention made clear that the party is now undeniably his. He may or may not dial down the talk of revenge for the general election campaign, but that is almost beside the point. He will do what he wants if he returns to office.

And despite the varying views within the party on display here in Milwaukee, there remains robust support for Trump’s vision of a future in which his political rivals are behind bars.

As I was continuing my rounds, I came across Shelly Garofalo, an alternate delegate and precinct committee officer for Pierce County in Washington who told me that she was highly involved in Trump’s 2016 campaign and a delegate in the 2020 RNC.

And she was convinced of the righteousness of Trump’s proposed crusade and the ludicrousness of the cases against him. “They’re just trying anything and everything they can do to stop him,” she said.

She was also less interested in a détente than some of the other attendees.

“If they’ve committed crimes,” she argued, “they have to pay the price, and they have to go to jail.”

I asked her whether it was a good idea to prosecute Biden. She politely held firm.

“I think they’re trying to stop Trump before Trump can open up all the books and see all the crimes that other people have done,” she told me.

“If Joe Biden has committed crimes, he should be investigated and prosecuted,” she added, before closing on what now counts as a slightly magnanimous note.

“And if he hasn’t, fine — he’s a free man.”