It’s Presidents’ Day, and America’s 45th is having a real one.
Donald Trump spent the morning of the Monday holiday railing against the nearly half-billion-dollar court judgment levied against him for fraud in New York state, and grotesquely comparing himself to the Russian political dissident Alexei Navalny, who died last week in an Russian arctic penal colony.
Trump started shitposting not long after dawn on his Truth Social network. Stinging from his massive court defeat, Trump seemed determined to keep litigating his fraud case in the court of public opinion. In seething ALL CAPS, Trump railed against the court finding that he and his family business had fraudulently and systematically overstated the value of real estate assets — including by inflating the square footage of Donald’s own Trump Tower penthouse apartment.
“My financial statements were understated, not overstated!” Trump wrote, blasting the “crooked, hand picked judge” whom he claimed failed to include in court calculations the “brand value” of the Trump name, which the former president modestly suggested is “known and accepted to be worth many billions of dollars.” (Over the weekend, Trump attempted to leverage that brand value with the launch of $400 “Never Surrender” high tops at Sneaker Con.)
Trump suggested, without evidence, that the judge was in league with the “radical left, Soros backed, slob of an attorney general” — an apparent dig at New York AG Letitia James — and the White House in “an attack on crooked Joe Biden’s political opponent, me!” Trump whined that “nothing like this has ever happened in our country before,” calling it “strictly third world, Russia, China at their worst.”
In his next post Trump, then compared himself to Navalny, the jailed Russian opposition leader who is widely believed to have been murdered last week by the government of Vladimir Putin. Never mind that Trump maintained chummy relations with the Russian dictator as president. (Reflecting on that friendship in 2021, Trump remarked: “I got along great with President Putin. I liked him. He liked me.”)
Right-wing talking points demand little intellectual integrity. And in the wake of Navalny’s suspicious death, conservatives have been painting Trump as though he were the persecuted “opposition leader” of a brave dissident party.
On Sunday Trump drew out this false parallel explicitly in a Truth post in which he wrote: “Biden:Trump::Putin:Navalny”. In his Presidents’ Day post, Trump elaborated that “the sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our country.” He warned that “a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges” is “leading us down a path to destruction.” He insisted that, “Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA.”
In short, Trump is spending the Presidents’ Day holiday much the same way he spent his one, scandal-tarred term in the White House — distorting any normal concept of patriotism and instead making it all about him.
