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Michelle Goldberg

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

A truism of the Trump era is that every accusation is a confession. When Donald Trump hurls wild charges at his opponents, he is telegraphing what he plans to do to them, preemptively justifying the breaking of laws and norms by casting himself as the victim of the very misdeeds he’s going to commit.

That is how we should understand Trump’s ranting in the wake of his 34 felony convictions last week. After he was found guilty, he told reporters gathered outside the courthouse, “This was done by the Biden administration in order to wound or hurt an opponent.” It’s tedious to fact-check such claims — the MAGA movement doesn’t care what’s true and what’s not — but President Biden had nothing to do with the state case brought by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. And as if to underline Biden’s refusal to interfere in Justice Department decisions, the federal prosecution of the president’s son Hunter Biden begins this week. In spinning this fantasy about Biden, Trump is telegraphing that, should he return to the White House, he will try to use the Justice Department in exactly the way he’s pretending it was used against him. When the former president compares himself to the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died earlier this year in an Arctic prison colony, he’s giving himself permission to act like Vladimir Putin.

In an interview with three Fox News hosts on Sunday, his first since his conviction, Trump all........

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