Conservative attorney George Conway said Donald Trump doesn’t have many options after being arraigned on Thursday on charges related to his actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Conway told The Washington Post’s “Please, Go On” podcast that an insanity defense “actually might be his best defense because he does give the appearance of being completely out of his mind.”
But ultimately even that approach wouldn’t work.
“He does know the difference between right and wrong, as illustrated in the documents case,” in which Trump allegedly tried to have the surveillance video of the documents being moved destroyed.
“He knows it’s bad. He knows what he had done is wrong and he needed to cover it up,” Conway said. “So he does have the capacity to understand the difference between truth and lies and between right and wrong. He just doesn’t care.”
But Conway, a longtime Trump critic, did offer one suggestion when asked how he would advise the former president.
“I would tell him that he needs to own up to it and plead guilty and work out a deal with the government,” Conway said. “One of the things that the Justice Department will consider doing in settling, in plea-bargaining political corruption cases, is to take a commitment from the defendant, an enforceable commitment from the defendant, not to hold public office again, to resign.”
That, he added, is what happened with Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who pleaded no contest to tax evasion and agreed to resign.
“And so what I would say is, you need to work out the best deal possible, and you just have to say, you’re just going to leave public life and pay a fine, and I’d do my best to keep him out of prison,” he said.
Conway said there’s one problem with that approach: Trump himself would never agree to it.
“He would never do it,” Conway said.