"HELL BENT" on clinging to power: Trump engages in mad projection over new Jack Smith court filing

Special counsel Jack Smith revealed new details Wednesday on how the former president tried to stage a coup d'état

By Nicholas Liu

News Fellow

Published October 3, 2024 10:30AM (EDT)

US President Donald Trump speaks at "Save America March" rally in Washington D.C., United States on January 06, 2021 | Special counsel Jack Smith (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)
US President Donald Trump speaks at "Save America March" rally in Washington D.C., United States on January 06, 2021 | Special counsel Jack Smith (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

Former President Donald Trump is furious over a damning 165-page court filing from special counsel Jack Smith released Wednesday that further details his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Within minutes of Judge Tanya Chutkan releasing the document, Trump sent out a string of Truth Social posts claiming that the filing was a plot concocted by Democrats to steal the election, a claim he repeated during a two-minute diatribe on NewsNation.

The Truth Social series began with a preface in which he declared that the Jan. 6 case would end in "COMPLETE VICTORY FOR “PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP" just like "THE FULLY DEBUNKED RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, IRAN, IRAN, IRAN, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, 51 INTELLIGENCE AGENTS, SPYING ON MY CAMPAIGN, IMPEACHMENT HOAX NUMBER ONE, IMPEACHMENT HOAX NUMBER TWO, OR ANY OF THE OTHER SCAMS, THIS ILLEGAL ACTION TAKEN BY THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, INCLUDING THEIR RAID ON MAR-A-LAGO."

Trump then moved on to his unsupported thesis that the filing was an attempt by the "Harris-Biden regime" to "INTERFERE IN THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION" and reverse the momentum he has from "dominating the Election cycle."

"Deranged Jack Smith, the hand picked Prosecutor of the Harris-Biden DOJ, and Washington, D.C. based Radical Left Democrats, are HELL BENT on continuing to Weaponize the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power," he raged, calling the entire case "a Partisan, Unconstitutional, Witch Hunt, that should be dismissed, entirely, just like the Florida case was dismissed!"

After a one-and-a-half hour break, Trump returned to Truth Social with his contention that the amorphous entity appearing to consist of the Biden administration, the Harris campaign, the Democratic Party and the Department of Justice was "guilty of the Worst Election Interference in American History" and in doing so was "trying to DESTROY OUR DEMOCRACY, allowing millions of people to enter our Country illegally."

But Trump struck a defiant note against the forces he sees arrayed against him, reassuring his followers once again that "THEY WILL FAIL, AND WE WILL SAVE OUR NATION!"

The former president then singled out the "DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE," which he said should not have done anything with his pending cases 60 days before the election but "DISOBEYED THEIR OWN RULE IN FAVOR OF COMPLETE AND TOTAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE. I DID NOTHING WRONG, THEY DID! THE CASE IS A SCAM, JUST LIKE ALL OF THE OTHERS, INCLUDING THE DOCUMENTS CASE, WHICH WAS DISMISSED!"

Smith's filing — coming this late in 2024 only because the former president's legal team repeatedly sought to delay the case —includes Trump's reaction to news that former Vice President Mike Pence had been moved to a secure location in the U.S. Capitol ("so what?") and his alleged declaration to his wife Melania and daughter Ivanka that “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

A Trump campaign spokesperson, apparently fuming over his boss being portrayed in such a light, told Reuters that "his entire case is a partisan, Unconstitutional Witch Hunt that should be dismissed entirely, together with ALL of the remaining Democrat hoaxes."

The documents case in Florida, which was dismissed by the Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon, is currently being appealed by Smith. The prosecution alleges that Trump improperly hid scores of classified national security documents in his Mar-a-Lago resort after leaving office.

Later on Wednesday evening, Trump took his case to NewsNation, calling Smith a "deranged person" who "lost the big documents case, that was the biggest of them all.”

"This was a weaponization of government and this is why it was released 30 days before the election,” he said. “And it’s nothing new in there, by the way, nothing new. They rigged the election. I didn’t rig the election. They rigged the election.”


By Nicholas Liu

Nicholas (Nick) Liu is a News Fellow at Salon. He grew up in Hong Kong, earned a B.A. in History at the University of Chicago, and began writing for local publications like the Santa Barbara Independent and Straus News Manhattan.

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Donald Trump Jack Smith