Former President Donald Trump's defenders are continuing to assert that the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee is being treated unfairly in the courts after he was convicted of 34 felonies last week. But one of his surrogates took the rhetoric a step further in a recent interview.
During a Tuesday appearance on far-right network Newsmax, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) not only continued to maintain Trump's innocence, but he suggested that Republicans needed to step up their attacks on both Democrats and the justice system itself. He said his GOP colleagues were "not taking this as seriously as we should."
"The American people need to wake up. This is a war," Tuberville said. "This is a war on our Constitutional rights, on our Constitutional republic. You know, this is not as much about Donald Trump as about the people of this country."
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"I don't call us Republicans or Democrats anymore, you're either for our great country, the way it's been for the last 248 years, or you're anti. You want to change it to how you want it to be," he added.
Tuberville and other high-profile Republicans had been regular fixtures at Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan. Both Tuberville and other GOP elected officials — including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Florida) — repeatedly attacked witnesses, jurors and even Judge Juan Merchan's daughter, who works as a Democratic campaign consultant. Notably, the targets of those speeches were all protected by Merchan's gag order, which Trump himself violated on 10 different occasions.
After one such appearance in May, the Alabama Republican admitted to Newsmax that helping Trump circumvent the gag order was "one of the reasons we went."
"Hopefully, we'll have more and more senators and congressmen go up there every day to represent him, and be able to overcome this gag order," Tuberville said.
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Alabama's senior U.S. senator asserted that Trump's guilty verdict was a consequence of Democrats being "worried about Republicans taking back over" and that the presumptive GOP nominee being found guilty of felonies was actually a signal that his party would emerge victorious this fall
"We will take back, November the fifth, if they continue down this road," said Tuberville.
Watch the video of Tuberville's comments below, or by clicking this link.
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