After Donald Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts in his New York trial, the pro-Trump enthusiasts at Newsmax served up lost of Trump-fluffing content as well as the usual columnist freakouts.
By Terry Krepel Posted 8/21/2024
Newsmax spent much of Donald Trump’s New York trial serving up pro-Trump narratives and cheerleading. When the case went to the jury, Newsmax had some time to kill, so it spent May 29 bucking up its pro-Trump audience by pushing more narratives it would like. Michael Katz served up more whining from Trump:
As the jury concluded its first day of deliberations in Donald Trump’s trial in New York, the former president said Wednesday it’s still unclear what criminal statute he violated.
The jurors reportedly deliberated for more than four hours and were dismissed after asking for portions of the testimony from two witnesses and at least some of Judge Juan Merchan’s instructions to be read back to them.
“The confusion is, nobody knows what the crime is because there’s no crime,” Trump said in a statement outside the Manhattan courthouse after the jury was dismissed. “Nobody knows what the crime is. The DA [Democrat Alvin Bragg] didn’t name the crime.
“They don’t know what the crime is. That’s what the problem is. It’s a disgrace. This thing ought to be ended immediately. The judge ought to end it and save his reputation.”
As Trump well knows, Trump faced 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Katz did note in his article, but he then tried to obfuscate things:
Prosecutors waited until closing arguments Tuesday — after the defense rested its case and could not respond — to disclose the underlying crime was violating federal campaign-finance law, which the state of New York has no jurisdiction to enforce. Only federal agencies such as the Department of Justice and Federal Elections Commission can enforce such violations, and both refused to prosecute Trump.
Newsmax also served up part of its usual coterie of Trump sycophants to complain and speculate:
Newsmax also took time to have a mini-meltdown over actor Robert De Niro paying a visit outside the courthouse. James Hirsen huffed in a May 29 column:
In what looked and smelled a lot like a Hollywood junket, the Biden campaign recently held a surprise press conference of its own outside the now-famous Manhattan courtroom.
It featured none other than actor Robert De Niro, along with two former Capitol police officers.
The big problem for the Dems, though, is that the event turned out to be a huge flop at the political box office.
The Biden campaign trotted out an extremely crabby De Niro, who sported a nonglitzy COVID mask and read from a script that appeared to be scribbled on note cards.
The actor went from a stammer to a ramble to a rant, his lines falling flat and his performance likewise.
[...]
Personally, I am stunned that an actor of De Niro’s stature would have risked squandering away his fame capital in such a blatant manner.
Where in the world were his handlers?
AWOL, I guess, because it seems that he is making a series of career-busting blunders.
He recently provided his voice to the Biden campaign for a political ad and boasted about joining the efforts of the 2024 Democratic presidential campaign.
Sadly, the once widely-esteemed actor looked bad and sounded worse. He also managed to offend tens of millions of Americans during the supposed Hollywood-style presser, calling Trump supporters “clowns” and “gangsters.”
No doubt it was a bad career move for De Niro.
But it may turn out to be an even worse one for the current occupant of the White House.
Then again, Hirsen’s idea of an “esteemed actor” is Shia LeBeouf, who’s more famous for abusing his girlfriends than any recent acting gig.
Mike Huckabee came in to whine about De Niro as well, as well as demonstrate his residency in an alternate universe when it comes to Trump:
“I think the craziest thing these people on the left are saying is Donald Trump won’t leave,” he continued. “Excuse me, but he did leave. He was president for four years, and we had a very orderly transition of power. People say, ‘Well, what about Jan. 6?’ Donald Trump didn’t go down to the Capitol and throw anything. Certainly, he had questions about the election — a lot of us still do — but he left office just like he said he would on Jan. 20, and Joe Biden became president. So, this is nonsense, and these people keep saying stuff that don’t make sense.”
Huckabee seems to have forgotten that Trump didn’t have to “go down to the Capitol and throw anything” — he incited hundreds of people to do that to keep his own hands clean so people like Huckabee can make ridiculous claims about it.
When Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts he faced, Newsmax’s main report on it was, unsurprisingly, a wire article. It also served up a couple process articles, a couple of which were wire articles:
But as usual for a pro-Trump “news” organization, the bulk of of post-verdict coverage involved Trump and various Trump sycophants whining about the verdict and touting his fundraising:
This was joined by a wire article touting how “Major Republican donors said on Thursday they were willing to back Donald Trump’s November presidential campaign, despite his becoming the first convicted felon running for the high office,” as well as an article by Mark Swanson that was effectively a Trump campaign press release:
The donation website for Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump crashed from a wave of traffic moments after Thursday’s guilty verdict against him in New York was announced, Trump’s campaign said.
“So many Americans were moved to donate to President Trump’s campaign that the WinRed pages went down,” the campaign posted at 5:51 p.m. ET.
The site was down for roughly 30 minutes. The campaign said WinRed was “back online” in a 6:25 p.m. ET post.
When it did return, there was a new message from Trump.
“The Left thinks that if they bury me with enough witch hunts and intimidate my family and associates that I’ll eventually throw up my hands and give up on our America First movement,” the statement said. “Let me be as clear as possible: I will never stop fighting for you.”
Swanson added that “Newsmax reached out to the Trump campaign for comment,” but made no mention of seeking comment from anyone else to offer journalistic balance to his article.
On the day after the verdict, May 31, the whining ramped up, with many of those talking heads appearing on Newsmax TV: and also trying to put a positive spin on Trump’s criminality and lashing out at those who brought Trump to justice:
The apparently unironically named Charlie McCarthy served as a servile mouthpiece for the man himself in a May 31 article:
Former President Donald Trump spoke to voters Friday morning, the day after he was found guilty on 34 felony charges.
The former president, while standing before a group of U.S. flags at Trump Tower in New York City, spoke for nearly 40 minutes. He began his comments by issuing a warning about Democrats in charge of the country and New York.
“This is, a case where if they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Trump said. “These are bad people. These are, in many cases, I believe, sick people.”
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee for November’s election, Trump said his legal team would be appealing the “scam” case, and said he was “honored” to continue the fight for justice.
He also aimed his comments at the policies of President Joe Biden, whom Trump likely will oppose in the presidential election.
This was joined by an article on how “Donald Trump’s prospective vice-presidential picks sounded off Friday against the former president’s conviction.”
A couple of articles were dedicated to post-verdict fundraising by Trump and polling results:
An article by Michael Katz complained that “Hillary Clinton delighted in Donald Trump’s guilty verdict in New York, and took advantage by offering merchandise that reflected her views about the former president’s legal troubles.” The only other articles that offered an alternative view were a wire article noting Stormy Daniels’ silence since the verdict as well as one by Fran Beyer noting that “Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan drew ire after he urged Americans to “respect” the guilty verdict in former President Donald Trump’s fraud case.” Interestingly, Newsmax also published a wire article noting that the Kremlin claimed that the verdict “showed that all legal and illegal means were being used in the United States to get rid of political rivals.”
Newsmax’s favorite Trump toady, Dick Morris, served up a column spinning the verdict:
The conviction of Donald Trump by a New York City jury will have no effect on the election.
There may be some short-term trend against Trump but the public fully understands the nature of this verdict and the partisan bias behind it.
Judge Juan Merchan has guaranteed that this verdict will be perceived as a manifestation of judicial bias. His daughter’s employment by the Democratic Party as a fundraiser, and his biased rulings throughout the case, make his bias evident.
Undoubtedly, Democrats will attempt to make this verdict the linchpin in the 2024 election, but in doing so, they will be wrong.
Voters have decided to support Trump because of the issues affecting them such as inflation, energy prices, crime, and immigration.
No amount of Democratic Party posturing, shouting that Trump is a convicted felon can change that.
A column by Michael Dorstewitz appeared to reject the rule of law and be eager to kill anyone who doesn’t vote for Trump:
Yesterday the jury box failed us — it failed freedom and everything that America has stood for since its founding.
We’ll have a chance to correct that mistake on Nov. 5.
And in order to repair the damage that’s been done to America during the last three-and-a-half years, we’ll need to vote not just for Trump, but for every Republican candidate down-ballot.
That’s the best way to correct yesterday’s verdict — that’s how we show the world that we can acknowledge our mistakes and correct them peacefully.
Because if that fails, all we’ll have left is liberty’s final protector: The cartridge box.
The day’s oddest take, though, came from American Hartford Gold, a gold seller who made the unfortunate choice of hiring disgraced ex-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly as its spokesperson, which bought an ad trying to capitalize on the conviction to sell stuff under the headline “What a Trump Conviction Could Mean to Your Financial Future.” It involved making a claim that “Bidenomics has already cost 401(k)s more than $2 trillion in losses,” which is, um, not quite true.
By our count, Newsmax published at least 44 pro-Trump articles in the five days after the verdict.
Columnist freakout
Newsmax cranked out the pro–Trump propaganda following his conviction on all 34 counts in his New York trial, and its columnists made sure to serve up performative outrage and pro-Trump spin on his behalf as well. Josh Hammer made his contribution in a June 3 column:
There are far too many technical deficiencies in Bragg’s “case,” to say nothing of the grotesque manner in which the presiding judge comported himself at trial, to recapitulate here.
But for present purposes, the key point is this: None of those details matter. None of them.
The key points following Thursday’s first-ever criminal “conviction” of a former U.S. president, rather, are three-fold.
First, the Democrats’ long march to get the nefarious Orange Man by any means necessary, beginning with the 2016 election cycle, has finally worked.
There was the Russia collusion hoax — birthed by the failed Hillary Clinton campaign and laundered through Fusion GPS and the tony law firm Perkins Coie LLP. There was the illegitimate spying on Trump campaign hands like Carter Page.
There were the Democrats’ street hooligans, from the Women’s March of 2017 through the Antifa-Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. There was the constant deep state undermining of the presidential agenda.
There were two bogus impeachments — for an entirely inconsequential phone call with the Ukrainian president, and for the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol protests that transpired mere days before Trump was set to leave town anyway.
Most recently, there was the Aug. 2022 predawn FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago, and all the multistate lawfare that has followed.
And now, here we are.
Except, you know, the Trump-Russia investigation wasn’t a “hoax” and he named no mainstream Democrats who pushed “street hooligans.”
Second, American patriots of all political stripes must come to terms with the current fallen state of the nation. The prosecution and incarceration of political opponents on trumped-up (no pun intended) charges is third-world, tinpot dictatorship, banana republic-type stuff — pure and simple.
[...]
Third, it has never been more incumbent upon the Right to finally wake up and realize what is going on right now in this once-great nation.
Many conservatives and Republicans like to wax nostalgic about blindfolded Lady Justice — about neutral enforcement of the law, and about general norms of liberal neutrality. Will those on the Right finally wake up and realize where, exactly, our attempt to seize an unsustainable faux-moral high ground has gotten us?
Actually, what is “going on right now in this once-great nation” is that the powerful are being held accountable for their crimes, no matter how much Hammer wants to pretend otherwise. His desire to hold Trump above the law is the real banana-republic stuff.
Clarence McKee spent his June 4 column asserting that the purported injustice Trump faced is just like that of many black people:
For decades and even more, Blacks have complained that the criminal justice system was rigged against them — from prosecutors to judges to juries.
The white legal establishment and much of America said that such allegations were not true and those making them were paranoid race baiters.
They were told that “Lady Justice,” the most recognized symbol of the judiciary, is blindfolded because “justice is unbiased and should not be based on a person’s appearance or other outside influences” — such as race, color, or status.
Lady Justice holds scales to represent the impartiality of court decisions and a sword as a symbol of the power of justice.
Many Blacks would say, “Oh Really, what world are you living in.”
In New York, Lady Justice’s blindfold was ripped from her face and the scales of justice were tilted in an unholy anti-constitutional alliance between a far-left vendetta-seeking Manhattan District Attorney — Alvin Bragg — and a biased, conflicted, pro-prosecution Judge — Juan Merchan — resulting in the conviction of Donald Trump.
Trump becomes the first former President to be convicted of felony crimes.
When Trump says that the process was “a rigged disgraceful trial,” there are thousands of Blacks in prisons who have claimed their innocence who can understand how he feels.
[...]
The difference is that Trump’s case was based on his politics and being a threat to the survival of Biden and his socialist bedfellows in the Democratic establishment — not his race, color, or economic status.
However, the result was the same — conviction.
One thing is for sure — after the Trump treatment and verdict, the United States no longer has standing to lecture Venezuela or any Third World country about democracy and free and fair elections.
Nicholas Chamberas — who we last saw liking Trump’s prosecution to Stalin — spent his June 4 column being outraged that Trump was held accountable:
Many Americans are understandably outraged by a guilty verdict that could send our former (and possibly future) president to prison because business records may have been misclassified, an incident from which jurors were allowed (encouraged) to extrapolate a more serious crime which the prosecution refused (or was unable) to identify on its own.
[…]
In 2024 we’ve reached a point where the U.S. Secret Service is in consultation with law enforcement agencies over how to incarcerate a president who used his own funds so that a porn star would stop accusing him of an encounter he vehemently denies and that allegedly occurred almost 20 years ago.
Subverting the fairest system of jurisprudence the world has ever seen, and shredding institutional norms is not merely about guaranteeing another four years of Barack Obama loyalists running the country.
[...]
Another four years in power and they will keep our border wide open long enough for them to establish a permanent electoral majority.
“One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived,” these words uttered by Niccolo Machiavelli have been reified by the Democratic Party war machine ever since Donald Trump walked down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015.
They ecstatically launch one vicious hoax against him after another.
In order to achieve their dangerous and disastrous long term policy objectives they must personally destroy President Trump.
Total victory against him, his ideas, and his supporters is non-negotiable.
Brace yourselves . . . what we’re about to see unfold has never been unfurled against our democracy. Yes, Donald J Trump is on the ballot this November but so is American sovereignty.
And so are our decency, freedoms, rights, and the rule of law.
Meanwhile, Newsmax created a poll for readers to fill out, asking loaded questions like “Did Pres. Trump receive a fair trial in New York?” and “At his upcoming sentencing, do you believe Pres. Trump should be imprisoned?” Regular Newsmax readers have been indoctrinated to provide the desired answers. The poll also states that “Newsmax will provide the results of this poll to major media outlets. Newsmax’s results also will be shared with popular radio talk-show hosts across America” — though we haven’t seen the results mentioned anywhere in the media ... not even at Newsmax.
