The Rise of the Trump Defense. Oh Trumpers! Oh my!
“The President of the United States Says It’s Okay”: The Rise of the Trump Defense
Attorneys for Cesar Sayoc invoked the president’s words to help explain their client’s actions, part of a growing trend in which Trump’s name is surfacing in high-profile cases.
While Donald Trump was denying any culpability for inspiring the mass shooter in El Paso, Texas, attorneys for another right-wing terrorist, Cesar Sayoc, were arguing the exact opposite. “In this darkness, Mr. Sayoc found light in Donald J. Trump,” attorneys for Sayoc wrote in a court filing for the defendant, who was sentenced Monday after pleading guilty to sending pipe bombs to prominent critics of the president. “He became obsessed with ‘attacks’ from those he perceived as Trump’s enemies” and “decided to act out—to send a message, to try to intimidate and scare Trump’s perceived enemies.” A Trump “superfan,” Sayoc “began to consider Democrats as not just dangerous in theory, but imminently and seriously dangerous to his personal safety.”
The Trump Defense, such as it was, did not convince Judge Jed S. Rakoff. In explaining his decision to give Sayoc 20 years behind bars, as opposed to the lifetime sentence recommended by prosecutors, Rakoff said Sayoc’s support for Trump was “something of a sideshow.” Design flaws in Sayoc’s pipe bombs convinced him that Sayoc had intended to scare, not kill his targets. But the Sayoc case is part of a broader pattern of attorneys invoking President Trump’s influence and rhetoric in defense of their clients in criminal cases.
There have been at least a half-dozen such cases in the media over the last three years. In another high-profile case last November, an attorney representing Patrick Eugene Stein, one of three men convicted of plotting to bomb Somali refugees, argued that his client should receive a more lenient sentence because he was inspired by then-candidate Trump. “The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful, and contentious presidential elections in modern history,” attorneys Jim Pratt and Michael Shultz wrote. Similar defenses have been used in other cases that haven’t garnered the same level of media attention, as well: an attorney for a Los Angeles man who posted anti-Muslim threats on a mosque’s Facebook page argued that his client used “similar language and expressing similar views” to “campaign statements from then-candidate Donald Trump”; when a Florida man similarly made a threatening call to a mosque, his attorney noted the “very distinctly political climate” and cited the Trump travel ban; when a Penn State University student threatened to “put a bullet” in an Indian man on campus, his attorney argued he was motivated by “a love of country” and cited Trump “running for president of the United States saying that, ‘We’ve got to check people out more closely.’”
The Trump Defense has only become more salient since the president took office. Last year, a man accused of groping a woman on a flight told FBI agents, “the president of the United States says it’s okay to grab women by their private parts.” Earlier this week, when a man who suffers from a traumatic brain injury assaulted a child for not removing his hat during the national anthem, his attorney argued, “His commander in chief is telling people that if they kneel, they should be fired, or if they burn a flag, they should be punished,” so he didn’t recognize the assault as a crime.
The El Paso shooting has amplified a long-festering national conversation about the real-world impact of the president’s rhetoric. The suspect in the massacre, a 21-year-old white man, is believed to have authored a manifesto posted online shortly before the shooting that claimed he was trying to prevent a “Hispanic invasion of Texas”—rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from what Trump has said on Twitter and during campaign rallies. -snip
I don't recall this happening with Obama, Bush or Clinton's supporters committing crimes.
It should also be noted that the MAGAbomber receiving 20 years was a bit on the light-side, considering the severity and number of Federal and state crimes he committed. So the Trump-Defense might have factored in lowering his sentencing.