Donald J. Trump held a rally last week with two rap artists charged with conspiracy to murder, he promised to commute the sentence of a notorious Internet drug trafficker, and he appeared backstage with another rap artist who pleaded guilty to assault charges for punching a female fan.
While he awaits the outcome of his Manhattan trial — closing arguments are scheduled for Tuesday and a verdict could come as early as this week — Trump recessed court for a week, aligning himself with defendants and convicted criminals prosecuted by the same system he is fighting.
The appearance dovetails neatly into Trump's 2024 campaign, as he has said during his campaign that he would likely pardon those charged with storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and lent his voice to a recording of the national anthem by an inmate choir on Jan. 6.
There was a time when so many confirmed and suspected criminal offenses might have been too much for supporters of a presidential candidate sworn to uphold the Constitution, especially one who has been indicted four times and accused of a total disregard for the law.
But with less than six months to go until Election Day, Trump, who has long promoted a “law and order” message, He is surrounded by suspects and inmates, reinforcing his image as an outlaw.
“I don't think people appreciate how much Trump has embraced an image of lawlessness in this campaign,” said Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist who worked on Jeb Bush's presidential campaign and has been a fierce critic of Trump.
Miller called Trump's recent guest appearance a “vetting decision that would have been unthinkable in past campaigns.”
Trump aides did not respond to emails seeking comment on what message he was trying to send with the appearance.
Last week, Trump's rally in the Bronx closed with an appearance by two rappers, Sheff G and Sleepy Hollow, whose real names are Michael Williams and Teagan Chambers. Brooklyn prosecutors say the pair have been charged with conspiracy leading to 12 shootings. Williams also faces two counts of attempted murder. Both have pleaded not guilty and are out on bail.
Trump introduced the two to the audience from the stage at the rally and asked them to make brief comments, with Chambers delivering a brief and to-the-point message: “Let's make America great again.”
Two days later, Trump spoke to a hostile crowd at the Libertarian Party National Convention in Washington, promising to commute the sentence of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who was given a life sentence in 2015. At the event, Trump posed for a photo with rapper Afroman, whose real name is Joseph Edgar Foreman, who pleaded guilty in 2015 to assaulting a woman at one of his concerts.
In court, Mr. Trump is surrounded by his allies-turned-defendants. In the week that former fixer Michael D. Cohen was scheduled to testify that Mr. Trump approved a scheme to bribe porn stars and cover it up, Mr. Trump walked into the courtroom accompanied by his chief legal adviser, Boris Epshteyn, who has attended every day of the trial since his own indictment in the Arizona election interference case.
Among Mr. Trump's aides during Mr. Cohen's testimony were former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik, who served time in prison for fraud and was pardoned by Mr. Trump, and Chuck Zito, a former actor who served years in federal prison and was a leader of New York's chapter of the Hells Angels.
Trump has maintained that any investigation into him is political, the work of his opponents plotting against him. He has smeared various representatives of the legal system with the same label — political candidates he actively campaigned against and prosecutors appointed to investigate him — while supporting his most controversial supporters.
This reflex for Trump — ignoring accusations if they benefit him — is not new, but its magnitude has changed.
During his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump appointed Elliott B. Broidy, a financier who had pleaded guilty seven years earlier to bribing New York state officials, to his fundraising committee, a move that went largely unnoticed but might have attracted more attention had Mr. Trump not continued to break convention as a Republican front-runner.
Shortly after the election, Mr. Trump and his campaign became embroiled in an investigation into whether his political activities had ties to Russia. Several of his advisers were caught up in the investigation, including his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, his longest-serving adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., and Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump's fixer and personal lawyer.
Trump accused the investigation of being weaponized and repeatedly attacked Cohen after he pleaded guilty to a range of charges, including campaign finance violations, on Trump's orders, but the president ultimately pardoned Flynn, Manafort and Stone as part of a flurry of pardons and commutations in his final weeks in office.
Trump also pardoned people like Jonathan Brown, a Staten Island man with a history of making violent threats and who was then pursued by federal authorities as a predatory lender, who used his ties to the family of Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in seeking clemency.
Early in his presidency, Trump commuted the sentence of Rod R. Blagojevich, a former Democratic governor of Illinois, a move opposed by some Republicans, but Mr. Trump proudly invited Mr. Blagojevich to a recent Republican National Committee fundraiser in Florida.
Multiple investigations have been launched into Trump and his allies as he attempts to remain in office and block the transfer of power.
Those charged in those investigations include President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, current chief legal adviser, Mr. Epshteyn, legal adviser Jenna Ellis, and former Justice Department official Jeffrey B. Clark.
Two other advisers and allies of President Trump, Stephen K. Bannon and Peter Navarro, were found guilty of contempt of Congress for failing to comply with subpoenas to cooperate with a House investigation into the former president's efforts to stay in office.
Trump's latest actions come as his lawyers argue at the Supreme Court that he cannot be prosecuted in a federal lawsuit over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. On social media, Trump has argued that the president should be given “absolute immunity.”
Though Trump claims he was acting within his rights, he has commercialized his criminal charges, selling campaign merchandise featuring his mug shot from his Georgia indictment and aggressively raising money around his claims of persecution.
One of the campaign's most recent fundraising efforts has focused on Trump's false claim that his Mar-a-Lago private club residence was searched by the FBI in August 2022. The search took place after Trump ignored a grand jury subpoena seeking the return of classified documents remaining at the home.
But the former president has baselessly alleged that the FBI was trying to assassinate him, citing standard language used in a search operation order recently unsealed as part of a defense motion.
Prosecutors recently asked the judge overseeing the documents case to change the terms of Trump's release to bar him from making any further statements that could endanger federal investigators working on the case, a move the Trump campaign denounced as “baseless theatrics” and called for sanctions.
“Either he doesn't know the truth or he knows the truth and he lied, which is egregious,” Chuck Rosenberg, a former federal prosecutor and FBI official, said of standard procedure for Trump to pass on misinformation.
“He is very interested in using power, but not for a greater good,” Rosenberg said. “Rather, he wants power — including power over the Department of Justice — to benefit himself and his friends and harm others. He believes power belongs only in his own hands. This is a terrible corruption of what the rule of law means and is meant to mean in this country, and it is very dangerous.”
Fluvier Meco Contributed report.
