'A lifelong crook': Columnist takes a hatchet to GOP claims of Trump victimization

New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait is taking a hatchet to claims by many Republicans that former President Donald Trump is a victim of "lawfare" by Democratic attorneys.

Chait starts out his new column by bringing some receipts of things that many conservatives -- including Sen. Ted Cruz and the editorial boards of the National Review and the Wall Street Journal -- said about Trump before he became the GOP's presidential nominee in 2016.

In short, Chait finds that concerns about Trump's criminality have been shared in conservative circles for years and they only stopped talking about them once it became clear that he would be their only chance to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency.

"Before he won the Republican nomination the first time, Republicans were perfectly aware that his decades of bilking customers and counterparties, lying to everybody, and surrounding himself with known criminals posed a series legal risk," he said. "Now that that risk has gone from theoretical to actual, and it is being shared by the Republican Party, they seem to believe it’s not fair to hold him legally accountable."

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Chait also said that the fact that the GOP is still all-in on defending Trump shows a remarkable level of depravity within one of America's two major political parties.

"What’s unusual about Trump is not that a politician got into legal trouble, or even that a professional scammer went into politics, but that a political party allowed a crook to rise to its top," he said. "That, in turn, reveals the deeply unhealthy state of the GOP, not any extralegal steps being taken by his opponents."

Chait concludes his piece by mocking Republicans for thinking that Democrats are engaged in a conspiracy to indict a man whom Republicans themselves have admitted has flouted the law for decades.

"But no plot was necessary here," he writes. "The law finally catching up to a lifelong crook is utterly predictable."