As Donald Trump sat through his fourth week in a Manhattan courtroom, listening to prosecutors present evidence he committed 34 acts of business fraud to help his 2016 presidential campaign, Iowa’s leading Republicans spoke out, echoing his message that people shouldn’t trust the legal system because all the criminal cases against him are without substance and are politically motivated.
It started on Monday with Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird attending Trump’s trial, as part of his strategy to get around a court-imposed gag order, and attack witnesses and court staff, potentially intimidating future witnesses in the cases against him.
During a photo-op outside the courthouse following the morning session of the trial, Bird called the trial “a travesty” and the charges against the former president “a scam and a sham,” claiming that Trump was only on trial because “Biden knows that he cannot defeat President Trump.” Bird also attacked the credibility of Michael Cohen, the witness on the stand that morning and Trump’s former attorney and fixer, calling him “a perjurer, disbarred, convicted of lying” without mentioning that Cohen was convicted and disbarred for things he did on Trump’s behalf.
Bird has remained tight-lipped about her trip to New York, simply repeating that she had gone there to “support” Trump, and no taxpayer money was used for it. During a news conference in Ankeny on Tuesday to announce she joined other Republican attorneys general to sue California again — this time over a law requiring all heavy-duty trucks in that state to be zero-emission vehicles by 2045 — Bird refused to say who paid for her trip, and walked away from reporters as they repeated the question. Later that day, the Republican Attorneys General Association issued a statement saying it paid for Bird’s trip.
While Bird resisted answering Trump-related questions, the other Iowa Republicans who denounced Trump’s trial this week — Sen. Joni Ernst, Sen. Chuck Grassley and Gov. Kim Reynolds — all did so in response to questions.
On Tuesday evening, Sen. Joni Ernst posted on social media a clip of her appearance on a Fox News radio show. In the clip, host Brian Kilmeade, also one of the hosts of Fox News’ Trump-friendly Fox and Friends, asked Ernst, “When you go to Iowa, how many people are watching what’s happening in New York?”
“It is historic,” Kilmeade continued. “I don’t care where you stand on any issue or the former president, we’ve never had a former president on trial for something, now dating back again to 2016. When you go home, what do they say?”
“Honestly, Brian, people aren’t watching the day-to-day of the trial because they think it’s all baloney,” Ernst said. “And what they say to me is, ‘What is going on here?’ They don’t understand why he’s being persecuted like this.”
“Of course, then, it just makes them angry and it makes them want to defend him even more. Because what we see is the left coming after our former president because they don’t want him to see him be president. So, in their eyes, it is all political. And that’s the way I view it: it’s all political.”
Ernst concluded by saying the trial is “only encouraging more and more people to gather on the right, and push back against the left.”
Like Bird before her, and Grassley and Reynolds after her, Ernst never engaged with either the evidence presented against Trump or the substance of the charges he is facing, and instead repeated Trump-approved talking points about the trial. None of them acknowledge Trump’s decades-long history of dishonest business practices.
At the beginning of his real estate career in the 1970s, the Nixon administration sued Trump for illegally discriminating against Black renters. In the decades that followed, Trump earned a reputation for defrauding customers and contractors, and consistently lying to the media and the public over matters large and small. In 2016, Trump made history as the only person ever to be a presidential candidate while also contesting a class-action lawsuit over allegations of fraud. (Trump settled the lawsuit over his “Trump University” business two weeks after the election, agreeing to pay $25 million in damages.) While he was president, Trump had to close his self-named charitable organization after a judge found “a shocking pattern of illegality” in how Trump and his three oldest children ran the charity and ordered it shut down.
In addition, none of the Iowa Republicans acknowledged Trump being found civilly liable for a different pattern of business fraud earlier this year, and ordered to pay over $350 million as a consequence, or that Trump was found civilly liable last year for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll after years of denying both charges.
During his weekly call with Iowa reporters on Wednesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley not only claimed Trump’s prosecution was political, but also casually compared Trump to the almost 5,000 Americans brutally murdered in lynchings since the end of the Civil War.
“I think you’re seeing that whatever the Democrats were trying to accomplish by prosecuting in four different ways former President Trump is kind of backfiring on them,” Grassley said. “And I think I see it as a political lynching.”
Grassley clarified that he was referencing Clarence Thomas’s claim to be the victim of a “high-tech lynching” during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings after there was testimony about him sexually harassing female subordinates when he was chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Unlike actual lynching victims, the worst outcome Thomas faced was remaining a federal judge.)
As he typically does when he wants to avoid discussing a topic that might prove uncomfortable, Grassley claimed he is too busy serving the needs of Iowa to pay attention to Trump’s ongoing trial.
Gov. Reynolds also weighed in on Trump’s trial during a bill-signing photo-op on Wednesday.
The governor was at farm outside Ladora to sign two bills, one that requires plant-based meat and egg substitutes to be sold with labels that specify the product aren’t from animals, and the other restoring a capital gains tax exemption for farmers who sell certain livestock (the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency estimates the tax break will cost the state $5.3 million in the fiscal year beginning July 1 and more than $2 million each subsequent year). After the governor’s prepared remarks, she took questions from reporters and was asked about Trump’s trial and Bird’s New York trip.
Reynolds called the trial “ridiculous,” “a sham” and “an egregious act,” Radio Iowa reported.
“It should be stopped … If this was anybody else, this wouldn’t be happening,” Reynolds said on Wednesday after a bill signing ceremony on an Iowa County farm. “It’s preventing him from being on the campaign trail.”
The governor said she supported Bird being one of the many Republican officials who have participating in photo-ops at the Trump trial to help the former president evade the gag order imposed by the judge to prevent witness intimidation and try to stop threats being made against court staff.
“Other people have said, ‘Well then we’re going to go express our First Amendment right because we can say that this is a sham. There is no ‘there’ there,’” Reynolds said.
One of those people is Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a longtime Trump supporter, who appeared alongside Bird during the Monday photo-op in Manhattan.
“Hopefully we have more and more congressmen and senators to be able to go out and overcome this gag order,” Tuberville said during a Tuesday appearance on Newsmax. The Alabama Republican went on to explain, “And that’s one of the reasons we went, to be able to speak our piece for President Trump.”
The parade of Republican officials has continued since Monday, with even the Speaker of the House putting in an appearance.
Reynolds, however, has said she has no plans to attend Trump’s trial. The governor told Radio Iowa she is too busy with her work in Iowa to go to New York.
