A jury in Delaware found Hunter Biden guilty on Tuesday of three felony counts related to his lies on a federal firearms application, capping an end to a trial that exposed the crack addiction and out-of-control personal life of President Biden’s deeply troubled son.

The reaction from MAGA personalities was swift. Many expressed relief that the criminal justice system decisively meted out punishment to the offspring of a sitting Democratic president, and acknowledged that their previously expressed fears that the system is rigged against Trump have proved unfounded.

Just kidding! MAGA personalities are already claiming the opposite: Incredibly, they are declaring that this guilty verdict slapped on Biden’s son also proves that the system is rigged against Trump. Which reveals something essential about how dependent the MAGA worldview is on elaborate fantasies about the movement’s alleged persecution.

“Hunter Biden guilty. Yawn,” tweeted MAGA thought leader Charlie Kirk. “The true crimes of the Biden Crime Family remain untouched. This is a fake trial trying to make the Justice system appear ‘balanced.’ Don’t fall for it.”

“The gun charges are a giant misdirection,” added Stephen Miller. He added that the verdict is an easy opportunity for the Justice Department to hoodwink “a pliant media that is all too willing to be duped. Don’t be gaslit. This is all about protecting Joe Biden and only Joe Biden.”

Translation: How the heck are we going to raise money off of this? The law being applied equally to the president’s son is an utter disaster for us!

Actually, I should probably revise that notion a bit: MAGA figures very well may find a way to raise money off of this outcome, after all.

Trump’s campaign also got in on this sordid act, putting out a deranged statement claiming that Hunter Biden’s conviction is a “distraction from the real crimes of the Biden Crime Family.” For some reason, MAGA Nation seems disappointed by the outcome, as if they were secretly hoping for the opposite.

It’s worth dwelling on how convoluted the new MAGA claim truly is. First, recall that the special counsel who secured Hunter Biden’s conviction, David Weiss, was originally appointed as a U.S. attorney by Trump. Did he deliberately handle his prosecutorial task skillfully in order to serve this sinister end of making the justice system appear balanced, thus secretly doing Biden’s 11-dimensional-chess bidding?

What’s more, remember that the right exploded with fury last spring when prosecutors originally reached a plea deal with Hunter Biden (which subsequently fell apart), seeing the impulse to spare him a trial as another sign of a pro-Biden conspiracy. On top of that, during Hunter Biden’s trial, right-wing media figures relentlessly charged that Biden family members, including the president, were secretly trying to influence the jury and tamper with witnesses—more evidence of dark and dastardly Biden family machinations, this time geared toward getting Hunter Biden off. Now that the thing the MAGA right warned against (Hunter skating free) did not happen, it too has magically been repurposed into the same Biden-orchestrated conspiracy.

Finally, recall that the MAGA right’s primary purpose in focusing so relentlessly on Hunter Biden has been to gin up a case for impeaching and prosecuting his father, mostly around a tortured series of claims about the Bidens’ foreign dealings. Why haven’t either of these things happened? Well, House Republicans failed to find any basis for impeachment after months of trying. Despite all that effort, they still haven’t found any grounds for criminal referrals about President Biden to the Justice Department (they have referred their claims about Hunter Biden). Meanwhile, another special counsel, Robert Hur, did not recommend charging the president with criminal mishandling of classified documents because he couldn’t find evidence of it. Hur too was originally appointed U.S. attorney by … President Trump.

For the MAGA right, the problem here can’t possibly be that President Biden didn’t actually commit any crimes. It can only be that the Justice Department is too corrupted to prosecute them and that House GOP leaders are too weak-kneed and feckless (another bizarre MAGA claim) to ferret them out themselves. Bizarrely, after all that, now that Hunter Biden actually has been found guilty of crimes, that also cannot possibly mean the justice system is operating as it should, because that would be exonerating to the president and affirm his claims that he is keeping his hands off the department.

The enormous contortions required to portray the justice system as rigged at every turn show yet again that pretty much everything the MAGA right is saying about these matters is about laying a pretext for Trump, once back in office, to launch prosecutions of Biden and Democrats without cause, under the guise of tit-for-tat payback for something that wasn’t actually done to Trump and his followers. As I’ve argued, Trump and his MAGA allies relentlessly claim that he will seek “revenge” and exact “retribution” with such prosecutions, to reverse-engineer the deceptive impression that Trump was the victim of what he is threatening, i.e., prosecutions without a legitimate basis. Additionally, MAGA Republicans have constantly claimed that law enforcement has relentlessly targeted ordinary conservative parents (which is a lie) and that the prosecutions of January 6 rioters are illegitimate (they are absolutely in keeping with the rule of law).

The sum total of all this monumental deception is that Trump and his followers are being massively victimized by our justice system, and that only carrying out mass prosecutions against the opposition will set that right. That the president’s son was found guilty by a jury of his peers who evaluated actual evidence presented by prosecutors—just as happened to Trump in his hush-money trial—is kryptonite to this sleazy scam. Nothing is more devastating to the MAGA worldview than the idea that the justice system is actually functioning fairly.