Donald Trump has assailed the validity of his conviction in the criminal case involving hush-money payments to an adult film actor because “cheaters don’t like getting caught,” Kamala Harris said during a speech on Saturday.
“Simply put, Donald Trump thinks he is above the law,” the vice-president told an audience at a dinner hosted by the Michigan state Democratic party. “This should be disqualifying for anyone who wants to be president of the United States.”
Harris’s remarks in Detroit about the presumptive Republican nominee for November’s presidential election came after the former president has repeatedly disparaged the New York state judge who oversaw the trial culminating in Trump’s being found guilty on 30 May.
Trump has tried to persuade the electorate into believing that the judge, Juan Merchan, is unfair and somehow conspiring with the Joe Biden White House to which Harris belongs, even though it was state-level prosecutors – not federal ones – who brought the recently concluded case against him.
Trump’s rhetoric that his criminal trial in New York was “rigged” echoed his supporters’ justification for their attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, a desperate but failed attempt to keep him in power after his electoral defeat to Biden weeks earlier, Harris suggested on Saturday. She also alluded to how Trump and his allies have openly boasted about exacting retribution against those who are perceived to have crossed the former president and some of his aides.
“He suggests the case could be a ‘breaking point’ for his supporters, hinting at violence. He spreads lies that our administration is controlling this case when everyone knows it was a state prosecution. And he says that he will use a second term for revenge,” Harris said.
“You know why he complains? Because the reality is cheaters don’t like getting caught.”
While there was a generally friendly audience for her comments about Trump on Saturday, she was heckled by a pro-Palestinian protester demonstrating against the Biden administration’s response to Israel’s ongoing military strikes on Gaza. Officials quickly removed the heckler as the vice-president said, “I value and respect your voice – but I’m speaking right now,” the local television station WJBK reported.
That encounter wasn’t the only time over the weekend that Biden’s administration was reminded of public dissatisfaction with its handling of the war in Gaza, which the Israeli military launched in response to Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.
Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside the White House on Saturday. Though footage posted to social media showed police using pepper spray on demonstrators, the Republican US senator Tom Cotton – a vocal, far-right critic of the Biden administration – appeared on Sunday on Fox News and argued that the president goes too easy on such protests.
“Joe Biden thinks that these pro-Hamas, anti-American lunatics should be guiding American policy towards Israel,” Cotton said.
Harris took aim at Trump on Saturday as the former president and Biden are essentially tied nationally as well as in key battleground states, at least according to a new poll by CBS News.
That stalemate exists even after Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments delivered to Stormy Daniels, the adult entertainer who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with the Republican before he successfully ran for the Oval Office.
He still faces 54 other pending criminal charges accusing him of 2020 election interference as well as improper retention of classified materials after his presidency, allegations contained in two federal prosecutions and one state case in Georgia.
In civil court, Trump has been grappling with multimillion-dollar penalties for business practices deemed fraudulent as well as a rape accusation that a judge has determined to be substantially true.
Republicans, meanwhile, have sought to embarrass Biden over the fact that his son, Hunter, had spent the previous several days standing trial on federal gun charges in Delaware.
