“Trump’s inner orbit is keenly aware that he’s lost the excitement of 2016 and there’s a school of thought that ginning up the most die-hard part of his base is the key to bringing it back,” said Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as White House strategic communications director for Mr. Trump before breaking with him after the 2020 election. “The reality is, however, that means reaching out to fringe, racist elements that have traditionally been sidelined by the mainstream of the party.”
Asked on Thursday for his reaction to the conviction on Tuesday of Mr. Rhodes and a subordinate, Mr. Trump’s office responded by pointing to his video statement to the Jan. 6 families’ fund-raiser.
The evidence at trial showed that Mr. Rhodes tried multiple times from Election Day until after Jan. 6 to get messages to Mr. Trump imploring him to invoke the Insurrection Act, which the Oath Keeper believed would make it legal for his militia to use force to keep the president in office.
In one message he tried to send after Jan. 6, Mr. Rhodes warned that if Mr. Trump did not stop Mr. Biden from taking office, there would be “combat here on U.S. soil.” But the trial did not establish that the message actually reached Mr. Trump, nor that he was directly involved in directing their activities.
The only president ever explicitly tied to sedition was John Tyler, but not for actions he took while in office. Long after his term ended in 1845, Tyler joined his native Virginia in abandoning the Union he had once led. He served in a secession convention triggering the Civil War as well as in the provisional congress of the breakaway Southern states, then got elected to the permanent Confederate House of Representatives, although he died before he could take his seat.
Franklin Pierce, another former president and a friend of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, was seen as a Southern sympathizer during the war. At one point, he was accused by Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state of being affiliated with a seditious organization, a charge Pierce heatedly denied. In another episode decades earlier, Aaron Burr, a former vice president, was tried for treason for allegedly seeking to lure Western states to leave the nation but acquitted by a jury.
For all that, Mr. Trump stands out. The trial of Mr. Rhodes and his compatriots raises questions that have not been seriously asked about a sitting president in anyone’s lifetime, namely whether he had gone beyond inspiring violent extremists in a way that violated the law.
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