MAGA Grifters Show No Sympathy for the Casualties of Their Leader’s Recklessness
Jenna Ellis's plea deal this week was a reminder that supporting Trump was a curse to those who risked the most for him.
On Tuesday, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis became the latest associate of the former president to accept a plea deal in connection with Fulton County’s prosecution of Trump for lobbying Georgia against the 2020 election outcome. Ellis, who has long since ditched her former boss, tearfully read a statement apologizing for her role in the fiasco and for not scrutinizing the claims other Trump attorneys gave her to repeat, declaring she would not have represented Trump had she known better.
As punishment, she will serve five years on probation, perform 100 hours of community service, pay $5,500 in restitution, write a formal apology to the people of Georgia, and testify against Trump and the remaining co-defendants. Back in March, she was also censured, but did not lose her law license.
Trump himself, when asked if he was concerned about the news, was relatively restrained:
No, don’t know anything about it. Don’t know anything, but we’re totally innocent of everything, that’s political persecution...she was a big, big fan of that, and in order to do something I guess she made a deal, it’s too bad to see it. But no, not at all.
All things considered, the deal itself is far from ruinous—Ellis is still free, and $5,500 is not a major sum for a lawyer who’s also a national media personality. But between the months of fear, stress, demonization, humiliation, and threat of jail time faced by her and her various codefendants, her legal expenses which “significantly exceeded” the $216,771 she crowdfunded according to her lawyer (without help from Donald, by the way), and the far graver treatment and legal jeopardy facing the far-less wealthy, legally-capable, or politically connected January 6 defendants, it’s hard to deny that being a direct participant in any of the major battles on Trump’s behalf between Election Day 2020 and Inauguration Day 2021 was anything other than a curse.
In the world of Trump 2024, however, sympathy is entirely contingent on continued subservience to the man ultimately responsible for all this suffering. Several prominent MAGA grifters quickly accused Ellis of being “disloyal” to the cause and “scamming” her supporters, largely on the idiotic assumption that her legal defense must have cost far less than two hundred grand, with a clear-cut implication that she was somehow obligated to go down swinging:
Laura Loomer (a loathsome lunatic personally endorsed by Trump): “I TOLD YOU NOT TO DONATE TO THIS DISLOYAL WENCH. Today she accepted a plea deal, which will only require her to pay a $5,000 fine and get probation for 5 years. She didn’t even attempt to fight the charges.”
Alexander Shepperd (currently appealing a 19-month prison sentence because he followed Trump’s call for a march on the Capitol that was never going to accomplish anything): “When meeting Jenna years ago, I thought she stood for Election Integrity like We do, but I was wrong. She really only stands for herself.”
Alex Bruesewitz (a consultant whose firm received $35,000 from Trump’s Save America PAC last year): “it’s an absolute disgrace that she raised $216k from grassroots donors in the name of ‘fighting back’ and then immediately caved. Is she pocketing the money?”
Meanwhile, with the human cost of his boss’s behavior all around him, Trump advisor Stephen Miller thought Tuesday was the appropriate day to vent his frustration with people who haven’t showed enough sympathy...for Trump himself:
The petty attacks on President Trump from some in the GOP demonstrate a glaring ingratitude and grave failure to understand the harrowing moment in which we find ourselves.
President Trump is facing a regime persecution like nothing ever witnessed before in this nation’s history. All because he’s fighting for us against them [...]
Imagine then choosing this moment, as he faces down one merciless political persecution after another, to engage in personal slights, pile-ons and piddling polemics.
How about saying two simple words to the man who has endured so much for us all: THANK YOU.
Perhaps Miller is laying it on so thick as projection for his own indifference to the crisis of weaponized government, because the man who allowed weaponized government to run rampant happens to be Miller’s only path back to a White House job.
It’s already been well established that Trumpworld’s obsession with “loyalty” only ever goes one way. But the above helpfully illustrates the full extent of the perversity. Not only are people obligated to support Trump politically; they must be willing to risk crippling monetary penalties and time in prison in Trump’s name, even when one is only in harm’s way as a result of previously supporting Trump. And throughout it all, the suffering of Dear Leader must take precedence.
This is nauseatingly antithetical to everything conservatives are supposed to believe about responsible, effective, accountable government—the preeminence of the people in a republic, leaders’ status as public servants hired for a job rather than public masters elevated for their own glory, even the very concept of personal responsibility for one’s actions. Yet wide swaths of the professional Right—people who’ve coasted for years off countless books and articles and monologues and speeches and online courses about America’s founding principles—are content to either look the other way, or play along.
I was about to write that all of this will eventually come back to bite us, but then I realized how silly a statement that would be in light of the fact that it already has, repeatedly, ever since the Right settled into its submissive relationship with The Failure—the Covid lockdowns, losing the presidency, the “Stop the Steal” fiasco and January 6, the 2022 midterms, today’s insane asylum of a Republican presidential primary—yet the talk radio set and the activists and officeholders aligned with it are still coming back for more. So of course a few more lives thrown into chaos wouldn’t phase them.
The GOP’s presidential decision next year will tell us one of two things: either the Republican electorate sees all the above for what it is far more clearly than those who speak for them and is ready for the antidote, or the Left was more correct than any of us want to admit about conservatives’ regard for the suffering of our fellow man.