Trump defiant — and a little resigned — as he awaits sentencing

MIAMI — Donald Trump came across as resigned and defiant in his first interview since a jury convicted him last week, while Republicans on Sunday lined up to defend him and laid out a strategy to attack the prosecutors involved in the historic trial.

“I’m OK with it,” Trump told “Fox and Friends Weekend” about his feelings on possibly facing jail or house arrest after a jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records about payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels in an effort to influence the 2016 presidential election.

He added that voters, however, would have a harder time accepting such a sentence. “I’m not sure the public would stand for it,” he said in the interview with Fox News’ Will Cain, Pete Hegseth and Rachel Campos-Duffy that aired Sunday. “I think it’d be tough for the public to take. At a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”

Trump also left open the possibility of seeking revenge on his political enemies if he were to win a second term, telling his interviewers that he struggled to answer the question. “It sounds beautiful, right: You know, my revenge will be success. And I mean that. But it’s awfully hard when you see what they’ve done,” he said. “These people are so evil. And at the same time, the country can come together.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson filled in some of the blanks from Trump’s comments about retribution, accusing the Manhattan prosecution on Sunday of “weaponization of the federal government” and vowed to “fight back” with “everything in our arsenal … within the confines of the rule of law.” He specifically raised the Judiciary Committee hearing set for June 13 where GOP House members plan to grill Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Matthew Colangelo, one of the prosecutors who tried the case.

“The purpose of the hearing is to investigate what these prosecutors are doing at the state and federal level to use political retribution in the court system to go after political opponents, federal officials like Donald Trump,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

He added that lawmakers would also “look at” Special Counsel Jack Smith, who’s leading the investigations over Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left the White House, as well as the January 6 case and alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Republicans think Smith is “abusing his authority,” Johnson said, adding that House members would conduct oversight to “show the American people we're not going to tolerate this.”

The comments highlight how Trump and Republicans are messaging his conviction ahead of his July 11 sentencing and especially the November election. While it’s too soon to know how or if the conviction will affect the upcoming election, Trump’s defiance and his allies’ continued optimism that the outcome will ultimately help Trump has been a steady theme since the jury announced the verdict on Thursday.

Other Republicans who appeared on Sunday shows defended Trump and predicted the verdict would work in his favor in November, while one of his attorneys, Will Scharf, outlined the next legal steps to quickly appeal the “unjust verdict” for his client. Trump would “cooperate with the pre-sentence investigation,” he said, and his legal team would appeal all the way to the Supreme Court “if necessary.”

Ever since the verdict against Trump on Thursday, congressional Republicans have stood by the 2024 presumptive GOP nominee, concluding that the investigation and trial had been politically motivated and unfair. They’ve contended that the verdict would have little influence on who gets elected president in November, while the Biden campaign and many Democrats have stressed it shows “no one is above the law.”

Senate candidate Gov. Larry Hogan was one of the only Republicans to encourage voters to respect the verdict, a comment panned by Lara Trump, the Republican National Committee co-chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law, who said the former governor of Maryland wasn’t worthy of respect.

Both Republicans and Democrats agree that the Nov. 5 election will ultimately determine Trump’s political fate, given that he can still run for president regardless.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who’s among those being considered to be Trump’s running mate, said on “Fox News Sunday” that the verdict had brought members of his party together but stressed that voters would cast their ballots based on issues such as illegal immigration and inflation, which he argued were handled better under Trump.

“What we know about four years under Donald Trump is we had low unemployment, low inflation, high enthusiasm, law and order in our streets,” he said. “And we've had the exact opposite under Joe Biden.”

Another possible running mate, Republican Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, shared similar thoughts, saying voters were playing more attention to their circumstances than to the trial.

“Americans are going to come back to the issues that affect them,” the former 2024 presidential candidate said on “Face the Nation” on CBS, “because this trial outcome doesn't affect them.”