New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said this weekend that her sister is backing former President Trump’s reelection bid following the guilty verdict in the New York hush money criminal trial.
In a column published Saturday, Dowd said after the guilty verdict, she called her brother and her sister — both of whom, she said, are Republicans who had hoped for a Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley victory — to gauge whether Trump’s conviction had been a final straw for them.
Dowd said she was surprised to hear that her sister was swayed in the other direction.
“I wasn’t going to vote for Trump,” Maureen Dowd’s sister, Peggy, told her, according to Dowd’s column. “But now I am because I thought this whole thing was a sham.”
Dowd said her sister was sympathetic to former President Trump’s description of himself as a martyr and said she thought Democrats were out to get the former president, who is also the presumptive GOP nominee for president in 2024.
“I couldn’t get to sleep,” Dowd recounted her sister telling her. “I was dreaming that I was in jail after a sham court trial. I was thinking that if they arrest me, I’d be out of luck. My father’s dead and two of my brothers are dead. Who else would save me?”
The column comes just two days after Trump’s historic conviction in New York, where a jury of his peers found him guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a scheme to shield potentially damaging information from the American public ahead of the 2016 election.
Judge Juan Merchan set Trump’s sentencing date for July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Trump’s legal team has vowed to appeal the case.
“They want to put him in jail three days before our convention?” Dowd’s sister asked her, according to the column. “The man is surrounded by Secret Service. What will they do? Put him in a cell with four Secret Service guys around him?”
Dowd’s sister’s concerns echo those of many of the former president’s political allies, who have expressed outrage following the guilty verdict.