Donald Trump is now a convicted felon.
Donald Trump is still the favorite to be the next President of the United States.
Since at least 2017, Democrats have dreamed of the moment when a jury would convict Trump of a crime. And on Thursday, a Manhattan jury convicted Donald Trump of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.
But now that moment has come, the vibes are all wrong.
Trump’s conviction on charges of falsifying business records comes after he led the way Both national And swing state Polls for months, and Democrats surged increasingly anxious About Biden’s reelection chances.
Some might expect the conviction and subsequent sentencing to be a turning point for the 2024 campaign — the moment when the public is shocked to realize that, in fact, they don’t want a felon as president. There is at least some basis for that hope Polls are showing A significant portion of voters say they will switch from Trump to Biden after he is convicted.
But between Trump’s long track record of surviving past scandals, a powerful right-wing media ecosystem promoting an alternative narrative that Democrats are corrupt, and widespread dissatisfaction with Joe Biden’s presidency, it’s not clear that a conviction will really make that kind of difference. To practice.
What seems to have happened here is that, over the past decade, the idea of having a major political figure in prosecutorial jeopardy has been normalized. First, we got used to Trump being under investigation and then (quadruply) indicted. Now, Team Trump has successfully subverted the rules of politics to the point where even a felony conviction doesn’t matter.
It’s like the metaphor of the frog that doesn’t notice the water slowly boiling around it: we, the American voters, are the frogs.
A long, slow descent into a world where “President Convicted Fallon” is plausible
In the past, criminal investigations of leading politicians were a big, earth-shattering deal.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign balked at an FBI investigation into whether her use of a private email server compromised classified information. In July, FBI Director James Comey publicly opined that he was “grossly careless” but concluded that “no reasonable prosecutor” would actually charge him.
Then, in late October, Comey suddenly announced in a letter that he was reopening the investigation because new information had been discovered — new information that didn’t prove to be significant, but Comey’s letter and heavy media coverage had good reason to believe. This led to the election to Trump. (The week he published the letter, Trump won 3 points in the vote.)
Once Trump was elected, investigative attention shifted to him, first focusing on whether his associates worked with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. Trump’s own behavior, such as his abrupt firing of Comey, fueled these suspicions and prompted the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.
Mueller’s investigation attracted widespread public attention and seemed to have great gravitas. This, it was believed, was the kind of investigation that could remove a president, bringing down Trump like Nixon’s Watergate scandal.
But as the investigation unfolded, an important change occurred: Trump and his supporters got better at hitting back. He mobilized his allies in Congress and the right-wing media to launch an aggressive attack on the investigators, portraying all scrutiny of his conduct as illegitimate. So when Mueller got closer to finishing his report in 2019, the conclusion didn’t really matter anymore: Republicans in Congress almost certainly wouldn’t have removed Trump from office, no matter what the special counsel suggested.
This basic dynamic persisted during Trump’s first impeachment scandal — you know, on top of him trying to strengthen the investigation into President Biden in Ukraine — and after his attempt to steal the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Each time, the right will rally behind Trump, shield him from the consequences and ensure he remains a presence in our politics long after the storm has passed.
Meanwhile, the right has also become quite adept at creating alternative narratives where it’s really the Democrats and the people investigating Trump who are the real culprits. Fox News focuses sharply on Hunter Biden’s legal travails to send the message that Democrats are a corrupt party. Less ideological voters may hear both narratives and conclude that both parties are indeed crooked, which lessens the impact of Trump’s criminal scandal among the general public.
We don’t know for sure how Trump’s conviction will affect the polls, but there are reasons to suspect it will sink him.
But, some Democratic hopefuls say, this time is fundamentally different — a felony sentence that would formally criminalize Trump and even send him to prison. Perhaps this will be the tipping point for some voters to abandon him? They indicate some votes Whereas a significant number of voters said they would not vote for Trump if he were convicted of a crime.
Consider me skeptical. For one, people are predicting that this or that scandal will ultimately be the thing that brings Trump down — draining his support enough to end his political career — as he First entered politics in 2015. Such prophecies continue During his presidency, After losing to Joe Biden, And then His attempt to steal a second term for himself ended in violence at the US Capitol. But Trump’s dominance over the GOP base and the Republican Party in general remained unbroken.
I doubt swing voters will be particularly affected by this. Trump has long been plagued by scandal and voters have heard about his legal risks for years. That’s not what voters are suddenly learning the first time That he is immoral. The trial itself focused on an issue — the hush money paid by Michael Cohen to prevent Stormy Daniels from going public with allegations that she had sex with Trump — that was first reported in 2018. Specific allegations are technical, focusing on internal Trump Organization documents. The payment to Cohen was falsely classified as “legal services”.
But Trump tried to steal the 2020 election in plain sight. Yet if voters still consider voting for him, it seems unlikely that this conviction of a far less fruitful business record will stop them.
for this They are vote Where many voters said they would abandon Trump if he were convicted: Voters are answering hypothetical questions in a vacuum. But in the real world, these voters will also be exposed to pro-Trump messages: his accusations that he was treated unfairly, that the prosecution was brought by a partisan Democrat in a heavily Democratic district, that the underlying crime is no big deal, etc.
Finally, there’s another problem: It’s a two-candidate race, and many voters on the fence are disappointed in Joe Biden’s presidency. It’s easy to say, in theory, that a convicted felon shouldn’t be allowed to be president. In practice, there would only be two options on the ballot, so the lesser-of-two-evils argument would be stronger.
This means that if voters decide they really want to get rid of President Biden, they may conclude that the only realistic option is to impeach the president.
