How exactly was the Trump trial corrupt?

Love this from the Good Politics/Bad Politics team.  After digesting all sorts of Trump convicted content today, I especially like this from David Bernstein:

Two questions for the haters. Trump and his apologists say, variously, that the trial was rigged, that such charges would never have been brought against anybody else, that Michael Cohen is a big fat liar, and that nobody even knows what was being charged. Well. It was found that he illegally falsified 34 specific business records—invoices, checks with check stubs, and expense ledger entries—to deliberately conceal a large hush-money payment he made that was, itself, an illegal act of influencing the 2016 election. So first question: do you really think that such a set of actions, if true, should be legal? And if not, then second question: which parts of that do you truly believe didn’t happen? It seems to me that anybody denigrating the result should have to make and defend one or the other claim in a pretty specific way.

So much this!!  Of all the complaints from the right of how damn unfair this was and how Trump is a victim, I have seen not a single effort to defend his actions on the merits (or to claim he did not take these actions).  It’s all just a bunch of hand-waving about how it’s all corrupt.  If you’ve seen any defenses of Trump on legal merits beyond the fact that the prosecutor should not have brought this case, I’d love to see them.

And Jonathan Bernstein in the same post:

My favorite reaction to the verdict is the page HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery put up of “All The GOP Lawmakers Telling Trump To Drop Out After His Felony Conviction.” Of course, it’s a joke; there’s a picture of tumbleweed over a note that the page will be updated “as the GOP statements come pouring in.”

It’s worth noting, however, that Republicans actually don’t have to nominate a convicted felon, who has been indicted three other times, and who recently was found to have committed sexual assault and massive business fraud. Among other things. Oh, they’re going to, of course. And at this point in the nomination process it would require already-chosen delegates, who voters picked to vote for Trump and who were individually slated in most cases by the Trump campaign, to suddenly decide to go back on their commitment to the convicted felon – so even if the less Trumpy Republicans quit him now he’d still have the nomination locked up unless his strongest supporters changed their minds.

Still, the delegates and other party actors involved are in fact perfectly free to choose otherwise, and instead select any of the non-criminal Republican politicians who share Trump’s policy views. They could do that. They are making a choice.

Photo of the day

Great photos of the week in the Atlantic.  You know I love a good surfing photo:

A drone view shows a surfer riding a wave at Sunset Reef as seasonal cold fronts drive big swells into the Cape Peninsula in Cape Town, South Africa, on May 17, 2024. #

Nic Bothma / Reuters

A few post-conviction thoughts

Going to share some various takes that all resonate with me to some degree.

I’m going to start with Nate Silver, because he focuses on something I’ve been talking about a lot lately– low information voters.  You and me are paying attention to all this stuff, but a ton of Americans, who will vote, just aren’t following election stuff closely at all yet.

Silver:

But the fact that the public has been relatively inattentive to the trial does not necessarily strike me as good news for Trump. Traders at prediction markets might have anticipated this outcome — but polls show that most voters did not. It represents a material change in their state of knowledge about the election.

Now, obviously, it’s not as though Trump had some squeaky-clean image. If we applied a “scandal” flag to presidential candidates, like we did for Congressional candidates in the 538 midterms model, Trump would already have been tagged with it many times over. And the Manhattan case was certainly not the most important of the several trials against Trump. Something I suspect nearly all Americans can agree upon is that trying to overturn an election is several orders of magnitude more important than paying off a porn star.

Nevertheless, nearly every voter is going to see a headline like this one today or tomorrow — even if they’re reading relatively conservative publications like the New York Post:

 

And my question is what sort of impact these headlines will have on these relatively inattentive voters — the sorts of voters who won’t care very much about the cable news spin because they lead happy, fulfilling lives and aren’t watching cable news to begin with.

In the headline, I described these as “low-information voters”, but that isn’t intended as a put-down. It doesn’t mean these people aren’t intelligent. Being deeply engrossed in politics is actually a relatively unusual hobby, and I’m not sure it’s a healthy one. It is a perfectly rational choice to spend your time on other things. It is not even clear that voting is rational by the stricter definitions of that term, especially if you’re not in a swing state.

Nevertheless, many people who are only mildly interested in politics do vote out of a sense of duty. And they often rely on stylized facts about the candidates that don’t necessarily match the more nuanced reality. One reason that Biden’s age is such a problem for him, for instance, is because it translates well into being a stylized fact — 81 is awfully old for a president or any person in a position of remotely as much executive authority (and Biden often looks and acts his age). The simple heuristic DON’T VOTE FOR AN 81-YEAR-OLD goes pretty far.

But likewise, the heuristic DON’T VOTE FOR A CONVICTED FELON goes a long way, too. It’s a simple, irrefutable fact. Undoubtedly, Republican operatives will try to spin this fact away, but they may only get so far.

And these disengaged voters matter because they’re the ones who have trended strongly away from Biden since 2020:

And Brian Beutler, unsurprisingly, and correctly I think, arguing that Democrats really need to lean into this:

• Democrats also owe us some courage. The Biden campaign’s statement is decent, as are statements from the handful of Dems who’ve associated themselves with Trump-accountability politics (Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, et al). But as I sit here writing, Dick Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has said nothing, as his Republican colleagues mount an all-out assault on…the judiciary.

• If it were me, I would set aside any concerns I might have about couth to drive the gravity of the matter as deep into the electorate as possible.

• I would call it shameful for a major American party to nominate a felon for the presidency, and call on the party of Lincoln to go back to the drawing board.

• I would note that felons are frequently ineligible for employment and housing, and it’s the height of arrogance for Trump to insist that he, as a felon, be eligible for America’s most important job, which comes with America’s most famous house.

• I would note that an element of Trump’s crime was to cover up extramarital sex he had with porn star Stormy Daniels while his wife was home nursing their infant son; that he consummated this affair without protection; that if he’d impregnated her, he’d have paid for her abortion in exchange for her signature on a non-disclosure agreement; and that he now seeks to tell every woman in America if and when she can have an abortion.

• I’d note he wanted to cover up the Daniels affair because it nearly became public immediately after Americans first saw the Access Hollywood tape, and heard Trump brag that he sexually assaults women with impunity; I’d note that another New York jury recently found Trump liable for “sexual abuse,” or, in lay terms, rape. 

Andrew Prokop:

Some might hope the conviction and ensuing sentence will be a turning point for the 2024 campaign — that it will be the moment when the public is jolted into realizing that, actually, they don’t want a felon as president. There’s been at least some basis for that hope in polls showing a significant share of voters saying they would switch from Trump to Biden after a conviction. 

But amid a long track record of Trump surviving past scandals, a robust right-wing media ecosystem peddling alternative narratives that Democrats are the corrupt ones, and widespread dissatisfaction with Joe Biden’s presidency, it’s far from clear a conviction would really make such a difference in 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 under (quadruple) indictment. Now, Team Trump has successfully warped the rules of politics to the point where even a felony conviction may not matter.

It’s like the metaphor of the frog that doesn’t notice the water around it gradually boiling: We, the American electorate, are the frog…

Consider me skeptical. For one, people have been predicting that this or that scandal will finally be the thing that takes Trump down — driving away enough of his support so that his political career is over — since he first entered politics in 2015. Such predictions continued during his presidency, after his loss to Joe Biden, and after 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 has been unshakable.

I’m also doubtful that swing voters will be particularly affected by this. Trump has long been scandal-plagued, and voters have heard of his legal jeopardy for many years. It is not as if voters are suddenly learning for the first time that he is unethical. The trial itself focused on a matter — hush money Michael Cohen paid to keep Stormy Daniels from going public to allege a sexual encounter with Trump — that was first reported back in 2018. The specific charges are technical, focused on whether internal Trump Organization documents about repaying Cohen were falsely categorized as being for “legal services.”

But Trump tried to steal the 2020 election in plain sight. If voters are still considering voting for him even despite that, it seems unlikely that this conviction on the far less consequential business records matter would be the thing that stops them. 

David Frum:

It says something dark about the American legal system that it cannot deal promptly and effectively with a coup d’état. But it says something bright and hopeful that even an ex-president must face justice for ordinary crimes under the laws of the state in which he chose to live and operate his business.

Over his long career as the most disreputable name in New York real estate, Trump committed many wrongs and frauds. Those wrongs and frauds are beginning to catch up with him, including his sexual assault upon the writer E. Jean Carroll, and then his defamation of her for reporting the assault. Today, the catch-up leaped the barrier from the civil justice system to the criminal justice system.

The verdict should come as a surprise to precisely nobody. Those who protest the verdict most fiercely know better than anyone how justified it is. The would-be Trump running mate Marco Rubio shared a video this afternoon on X, comparing American justice to a Castro show trial. The slur is all the more shameful because Rubio has himself forcefully condemned Trump. “He is a con artist,” Rubio said during the 2016 nomination contest. “He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy—his entire career.” Rubio specifically cited the Trump University scheme as one of Trump’s cons. In 2018, Trump reached a $25 million settlement with people who had enrolled in the courses it offered.

Eight years later, Rubio has attacked a court, a jury, and the whole U.S. system of justice for proving the truth of his words.

We’re seeing here the latest operation of a foundational rule of the Trump era: If you’re a Trump supporter, you will sooner or later be called to jettison any and every principle you ever purported to hold. Republicans in Donald Trump’s adopted state of Florida oppose voting by felons. They used their legislative power to gut a state referendum restoring the voting rights of persons convicted of a crime. But as fiercely as Florida Republicans oppose voting by felons, they feel entirely differently about voting for felons. That’s now apparently fine, provided the felon is Donald Trump.

What has been served here is not the justice that America required after Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election first by fraud, then by violence. It’s justice instead of an especially ironic sort, driving home to the voting public that before Trump was a constitutional criminal, he got his start as a squalid hush-money-paying, document-tampering, tabloid sleazeball.

Greg Sargent, “Trump’s Stunning Guilty Verdict Shatters His Aura of Invincibility: His conviction on 34 felony counts is powerful new information, and we should hold institutional Democrats responsible if they don’t use it—ruthlessly and effectively.”

The guilty verdict that a Manhattan jury handed to Trump in his hush money trial—he was convicted on all 34 felony counts—is surely such a powerful spectacle in part because it upends that dynamic. Only hours ago, it was possible to still see Trump as a seemingly untouchable figure on the verge of defying us all again. An entire political party had lined up behind him to cast the proceedings as illegitimate. No matter how sleazy, grotesque, and damning the revelations, his grip on the GOP seemed to only grow stronger. His poll numbers refused to budge. He was violating his gag order with impunity, insulting the judge and his family, hypnotizing millions of rank-and-file Republicans into seeing him as a victim of overzealous law enforcement, and generally unfurling a big, fat middle finger at the justice system and at the rule of law itself.

He was getting away with all of it. Again.

Until he didn’t.

The force of this truth should inform how Democrats proceed now. Democratic operatives sometimes say there’s no sense in talking about Trump’s criminal trials, because his “negatives” are “baked in,” as the grating consultant-speak has it. Indeed, according to a source familiar with the situation, the Biden campaign has no plans for any paid ads on the verdict. The campaign did put out a powerful statement about the verdict, and it’s somewhat understandable that Biden himself is cautious about commenting on Trump’s legal travails, given that his own Justice Department is prosecuting Trump.

But that can’t set the tone for the whole party. Other Democratic groups and elected officials must do all they can to make sure that voters know about this conviction, and, importantly, that Republican lawmakers—who are running for reelection as we speak—lined up like little robots to savage the justice system, all to put Trump above accountability and the law.

In the end, I think this could have anywhere from a small to fairly substantial impact to anywhere in between.  I think a lot of that depends on what Democratic elites do and what the media do.  As for now… we’ll see.