JACKSON, Miss.—A week after a New York jury found former president Donald J. Trump guilty of 34 criminal charges, Mississippi Republicans held a rally urging voters to cast their ballots for the convicted felon in November.
“I don’t care what they say in New York City, we stand with Donald Trump,” Mississippi Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce Andy Gipson said Thursday during the rally he hosted at the Mississippi Agriculture Museum in Jackson.
The crowd roared with applause. Many waved miniature American flags.
“We’re going to fight harder than we did in 2016. We’re going to fight harder than we did in 2020. We’re going to beat them by a bigger margin than they can cheat by,” Gipson told the crowd, apparently endorsing Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election and falsely implying that Biden was not the rightful winner despite all evidence to the contrary.
Trump Is First Former President Convicted Of Felony Crimes
Trump became the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes on May 30 after a Manhattan jury found him guilty of falsifying business records as part of an illegal scheme to affect the outcome of the 2016 election using hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Despite the convictions—and three additional felony indictments awaiting trial in a state case in Georgia and two federal cases in Washington, D.C., and Florida—no laws bar Trump from running for the presidency again.
At the rally on Thursday, Commissioner Andy Gipson called the New York verdicts “ridiculous.”
“You and I know for a fact that Donald Trump is guilty,” Gipson said, as the crowd listened with bated breath. “He’s absolutely guilty. He’s guilty of patriotism. You are too and so am I.”
Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch agreed, saying that “the rule of law” is at risk in the next election.
“I want to talk for a minute about this New York case,” Fitch said. “It is flawed to the very core.”
The prosecution of Trump was a “manipulation of the law,” the attorney general told the crowd, claiming that “if we don’t take a new direction, every one of us is at risk.”
“Every person that gets in the judicial system, in the court system, you too could be manipulated. So we have to put in President Trump again,” she continued.
Gov. Reeves Accuses Democrats of ‘Weaponizing’ Legal System
At Thursday’s pro-Trump rally, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves delivered a prerecorded video message defending Trump.
The governor denounced U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who in April introduced legislation that would bar the Secret Service from protecting imprisoned ex-presidents.
Thompson praised last week’s verdict, saying on May 30 that it “confirms what we have always known: Donald Trump is a criminal who thinks nothing of breaking the law, or our Constitution, to get what he wants.”
“No one, especially an ex-President, is above the law,” said the Democratic congressman, who represents Mississippi’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes most of the Delta region and the capital city.
Thompson led the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and Trump’s role in it; the committee referred Trump to the U.S. Justice Department for prosecution over the insurrection in 2022.
At Thursday’s Trump rally, Reeves called the New York guilty verdicts that a jury of 12 citizens reached unanimously “an absolute travesty” and “un-American.” Echoing Trump’s rhetoric, he accused Democrats of “weaponizing our legal system in a desperate attempt to block president Trump from the White House.”
Former Republican Gov. Phil Bryant closed out the rally by urging voters to vote out Thompson, the state’s only Black or Democratic member of Congress, in the upcoming November elections.
The crowd inside the Sparkman Auditorium at the Mississippi Agriculture Museum cheered.
Bryant also asked voters to support Trump’s presidential campaign with a monetary gift. “Send what you can,” he told the crowd.
The presidential and congressional elections are on Nov. 5, 2024.