Maureen Dowd’s sister is backing Trump post-verdict

Following the guilty verdict in New York’s hush-money criminal trial this weekend, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said her sister supports former President Trump’s reelection.

in column In an article published Saturday, Dowd said she called her brother and sister after the conviction — both Republicans who she said had hoped Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley would win — to gauge whether Trump’s conviction was the final straw for them.

Dowd said she was surprised to hear her sister was leaning in the opposite direction.

According to Maureen Dowd’s column, her sister Peggy told her, “I wasn’t going to vote for Trump, but now I see this whole thing as a sham and I am.”

Dowd said her sister was sympathetic to Trump’s portrayal of himself as a martyr and believed Democrats were trying to attack the former president, who is also a leading Republican contender in the 2024 presidential election.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Daoud recalled his sister telling him. “I dreamed I was in prison after a sham trial. I thought if they arrested me, I was out of luck. My father was dead, my two brothers were dead. Who else could save me?”

The column was published just two days after Trump’s historic conviction in New York, where a jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a plot to conceal information that could harm the American people ahead of the 2016 election.

Judge Juan Marchan set Trump’s sentencing for July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Trump’s legal team has vowed to appeal.

“Do they want to put him in jail three days before our convention?” Dowd’s sister asked her, the column reported. “He’s surrounded by Secret Service. What are they going to do? Put him in a cell surrounded by four Secret Service agents?”

Dowd’s sister’s concerns are echoed by many of the former president’s political allies who have expressed outrage following the conviction.