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Tuesday afternoon, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville participated in a roundtable with fellow Republican senators Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Mike Lee of Utah, and Roger Marshall of Kansas.
Also on the panel were Trump’s former senior advisor Steven Miller, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, and former acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whittaker.
Brought on to speak about the supposed political prosecution of conservatives by the Biden administration, all three guests boast significant right wing and pro-Trump bona fides and have drawn harsh criticism from centrists and the left.
Back in 2019, a leak revealed Miller had repeatedly referenced and praised explicitly white nationalist websites and books.
In the years since Trump left office, the legal organization Miller founded, America First Legal, has filed over 100 lawsuits against “woke” organizations. Recently, it accused Northwestern University of “hiring women and racial minorities with mediocre and undistinguished records over white men.”
The organization Roberts leads, the Heritage Foundation, created and published Project 2025, the controversial policy platform Trump sought to distance himself from a few days ago.
And in a response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump v. United States that many understood as a tacit threat, Roberts claimed America is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Schmitt opened the roundtable by drawing attention to “[John] Eastman, [Steven] Bannon, [and Mark] Meadows.”
Eastman and Meadows, both Trump appointees, are being prosecuted for their work attempting to overturn the 2020 election results. Bannon, one of Trump’s early advisors and one-time editor of the far-right news site Breitbart, is currently in federal prison after being convicted of two charges of contempt of Congress.
When he was asked to speak, Tuberville called the politicization of the justice system a “deep state problem—it goes very deep.”
“Our Founders did not intend the federal government to get this big,” Tuberville said. “Power was supposed to be left in the states and to the people.
He continued: “We’ve forgotten that power hungry politicians have allowed the federal government to become bloated for their own personal gain. And now we have an out-of-control federal government full of career politicians who have never worked a real job and are hellbent on silencing anyone who disagrees with them.”
Tuberville also spoke about what he called propaganda in the nation’s public schools, referencing his “40 years in education.” (Tuberville was a football coach, not an instructor.)
Regarding the primary topic of the roundtable, the Alabama senator criticized “Joe Biden’s weaponization of justice” against Donald Trump and pro-life activists. He claimed federal cases against Trump “would never have made it to the court if Donald Trump had not been running for president.”
However, like many Alabama Republicans, Tuberville uncritically praised the Supreme Court’s decision on Trump v. United States. As part of that case, the former president had been charged with ordering the Department of Justice “to conduct sham election crime investigations.”
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that the president enjoys “exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials” and is therefore “absolutely immune” from all accusations of politicizing the Justice Department.
When the ruling was released, Tuberville called it “a crushing blow to Joe Biden’s 4-year witch hunt against President Trump” and did not comment on presidents’ newfound ability to order the Department of Justice to investigate their political opponents.
The guests on the roundtable all roundly condemned the Biden administration’s prosecution of Trump as well. Steven Miller went so far as to call it “fundamentally communist in nature.”
Saying he views it from a “historical perspective,” Kevin Roberts claimed that “our Founders would be horrified that either of our political movements, either of our political ideologies, our parties, would happen to be doing this.”
Despite his historical perspective, Roberts did not mention the Sedition Act of 1798, a bill passed only a few years after the Constitutional Convention and used by President John Adams (a Founding Father) to suppress his political opponents: Democratic-Republicans.
Roberts also continued laying out his vision of what a second Trump administration would look like, quoting President Reagan as saying that “people are policy.”
“People who go into the next conservative administration need to understand what’s at stake and be very well prepared to enact the directives of the executive,” he said.
Taken as a whole, the Tuesday roundtable established three points of unity among the participants: Trump and everyone else involved in attempting to overturn the 2020 election have been unfairly prosecuted; “woke propaganda” (in Tuberville’s words) needs to be removed from public schools; and serious executive action must be taken to reshape Washington.
