Just hours after Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, pled guilty to violating campaign-finance law on behalf of an unnamed political candidate in 2016, and Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, was convicted of eight counts of financial fraud, Trump was firmly ensconced in the safe space of a political rally in West Virginia, greeted by comforting chants of “Lock her up!” For the next few hours, the president studiously avoided mentioning the two men who may very well have thrown his political future into jeopardy, freewheeling instead about “no collusion” before a crowd that would accept—and even repeat—virtually anything he said. Yet even as the president pontificated, his right-wing allies found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being forced to fill his silence. Blindsided by not one, but two damning convictions, they did the only thing they could: everything. “There are a lot of lines of defense that are being wheeled out right now,” Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt observed to me. “It feels very much like throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.”

On cue, the right’s public-facing side pulled out every single pro-Trump defense it had concocted over the past two years. Within an hour of the verdicts breaking, The Five’s Greg Gutfeld was aggressively dismissing Cohen and Manafort as “two men who most Americans don’t know their names.” Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo went after Hillary Clinton, saying Tuesday morning that Robert Mueller’s probe had no legitimacy unless the former Democratic presidential candidate was likewise investigated for the infamous Steele dossier. A shrewder group of Republicans converged on the seeming lack of Russia-related convictions in the Manafort trial, putting their disavowals on hold: “Thus far, there have yet to be any charges or convictions for colluding with the Russian government by any member of the Trump campaign,” Senator Lindsey Graham said in a statement, in one of the more measured defenses coming out of the Republican Party. The line made its way into the official G.O.P. defense, according to notes that a surrogate texted to reporter Josh Dawsey.

A less artful group of Trump supporters deployed a different line of logic: if the Manafort convictions carried no mention of Russia, then the media’s Russia-meddling narrative was, ipso facto, false, and Trump was therefore innocent (never mind the fact that a second Manafort trial, centering around the former G.O.P. operative’s extensive work in Russia and the Ukraine, is set to begin in D.C. in less than a month). “So all this legal activity strange I see no ‘Russian collusion’ in any breaking news,” tweeted Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union and the husband of White House communications director Mercedes Schlapp. “Odd.” Still others, said Holt, went further off the deep end, asserting that the Justice Department was being “run as part of a conspiracy theory,” and the trial wasn’t proof of the “Russian hacking narrative’s” veracity.

Almost simultaneously, a large segment of Trump’s diehard, MAGA-oriented allies began pushing the story of Mollie Tibbetts, a college student who was allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant. The lead story on Fox News’s home page was dedicated exclusively to the case, as was Breitbart’s, while MAGA wunderkinds Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, and Tomi Lahren all tweeted that Tibbetts’s story ought to be top-line news, and lamented the “liberal media’s” preoccupation with Manafort and Cohen.

Fox and Friends simply ignored the convictions altogether in favor of discussing Tibbetts, along with kneeling N.F.L. protesters, and Andrew Cuomo’s recent gaffes. Though the outpouring could be read as spontaneous, it could not have come at a more convenient time—as former speaker Newt Gingrich put it to Axios, “If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble. If we can be blocked by Manafort-Cohen, etc., then G.O.P. could lose [the House] badly.”