by Andrew Prokop
Donald Trump is now a convicted felon.
Donald Trump also remains the favorite to be the next president of the United States.
Since at least 2017, Democrats have been dreaming of the time when a jury would convict Trump of the crimes. And on Thursday, a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.
But now that this has arrived, all the vibrations are wrong.
What happened? Former President Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 counts in a New York court case, the first of his four felon trials in which a verdict is reached.
What is it about? Broadly speaking, this refers to the secret $130,000 payment that Trump’s lawyer and arranger, Michael Cohen, made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels some time before the 2016 election so that Daniels would not publicly state that she had had a sexual relationship with Trump. Specifically, the question is whether, when Trump later reimbursed Cohen for that money, the Trump Organization had falsely recorded those invoices as “legal fees” in the company’s records.
And then? Juan Merchán, the New York judge trying the case, plans to convict Trump on July 11. Trump was convicted of 34 counts of a Class E nonviolent felony and has no past convictions, meaning he can face any prison term. up to 4 years in prison.
What about other cases of criminals? Trump still faces fees in three other cases, all of which have been delayed. The verdict is available before the election.
Trump’s condemnation of tampering with industry records comes as he has held a dubious lead in national polls and swing states for months, and Democrats are concerned about Biden’s reelection chances.
Some might hope that the conviction and resulting sentence will be a turning point for the 2024 crusade, that this is the moment when the public realizes that they don’t really need a criminal as president. That hope resides, at least to some extent, in polls that seem to indicate that a significant portion of the electorate says they would move from Trump to Biden after a conviction.
But amid a long history of Trump surviving beyond scandals, a physically powerful right-wing media ecosystem peddling selective narratives that Democrats are the most corrupt, and widespread discontent with Joe Biden’s presidency, it’s far from transparent that a conviction can make such a difference. in practice.
What turned out to have happened here is that over the past decade, the concept that a major political figure is in danger of being prosecuted has become normalized. First, we’ve become accustomed to Trump being investigated and then (quadrupled) indicted. The team has managed to bend the regulations of the policy to the point that even a felony conviction no longer matters.
It’s like the metaphor of the frog who doesn’t realize that the water around him is boiling: we, the American electorate, are the frog.
In the past, fraudulent investigations of prominent political figures were a provocative case.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s crusade was hampered by the FBI’s investigation into whether her use of a personal email server compromised classified information. In July, FBI Director James Comey publicly stated that she had been “grossly negligent,” but concluded that “no moderate prosecutor” would rate her.
Then, in late October, Comey suddenly announced in a letter that he would reopen the investigation because new data had been discovered; the new data did not turn out to be significant, but there is a clever explanation for why Comey’s letter and the heavy media policy tilted the election in Trump’s favor. (In the week since the letter was published, Trump has gained 3 points in the polls. )
Once Trump was elected, investigators’ attention turned to him, focusing first on whether his affiliates had worked with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. Trump’s own behavior, such as Comey’s sudden firing, heightened those suspicions and prompted the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.
Mueller’s investigation has attracted a lot of public attention and turns out to be very serious. He thought that the investigation that could destroy a president, could bring down Trump as the Watergate scandal did with Nixon.
But as the investigation progressed, a significant shift occurred: Trump and his supporters stepped forward in their ability to fight back. He has mobilized his allies in Congress and in the right-wing media to aggressively attack the investigators, calling any scrutiny of their conduct illegitimate. So when Mueller finished his report in 2019, the conclusion no longer mattered: Congressional Republicans almost would not have effectively gotten rid of Trump from office, regardless of the special counsel’s conclusions.
This basic dynamic persisted during Trump’s first impeachment scandal (you know, the one about his attempt to force the Ukrainian president to investigate the Bidens) and even after his attempt to borrow the 2020 election and the following attack on the Capitol on January 6. . Each time, the right wing will unite Trump, protect him from the fallout, and ensure that he remains a protagonist in our politics once the typhoon has passed.
Meanwhile, the right has also become very adept at constructing election narratives in which the real criminals are Democrats and Trump researchers. Fox News focuses intensely on Hunter Biden’s legal difficulties in sending the message that the Democrats are the corrupt party. Fewer ideological constituencies listen to either narrative and might conclude that it is actually either party that is corrupt, diluting the effect of Trump’s criminal scandals on the general public.
But, some optimistic Democrats say, this time it’s fundamentally different: a felon conviction that will officially make Trump a felon and even send him to prison. Perhaps this is the tipping point for some electorate to abandon him? They cite some polls in which a significant number of voters said they would not vote for Trump if he were convicted of a crime.
Consider me skeptical. For one thing, ever since he entered politics in 2015, other people have been predicting that this or that scandal will eventually bring Trump down, taking away enough help for his political career to end. Such predictions continued his presidency, after his defeat. through Joe Biden and after his candidacy for a second term ended in violence at the U. S. Capitol. But Trump’s dominance over the Republican base and the Republican Party in general is unshakeable.
I also doubt that the undecided electorate will be specifically affected by this. Trump has long been plagued by scandals, and the electorate has heard about his legal dangers for many years. It is not as if the electorate is suddenly informed for the first time that it is unethical. The trial itself focused on one factor: the hush money Cohen paid to save Stormy Daniels from going public with a sex allegation with Trump, which was first reported in 2018. The express fees are technical and focus on whether the Trump Organization documents the refunds to Cohen. were falsely categorized as “legal services. “
But Trump tried to borrow the 2020 election for all to see. If the electorate is still thinking about voting for him, it is unlikely that this conviction in a much less vital factor in the industry’s problems will be what prevents them.
As for the polls in which many voters said they would abandon Trump if convicted: Voters are answering hypothetical questions in a vacuum. But in the real world, those constituents will also be exposed to pro-Trump messages: his court cases that he was treated unfairly, that the prosecution presented to a partisan Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic region, that the underlying crime is not serious, etc.
Finally, there’s another problem: This is a race between two candidates, and many swing voters are frustrated with Joe Biden’s presidency. It’s easy to say, in theory, that no convicted felon deserves to be elected president. In practice, there are only two features on the ballot, so the lesser of two evils will be strong.
This means that if the electorate really needs President Biden out of the country, they might conclude that the only realistic option is the convicted criminal president.
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