Donald Trump Has Some Thoughts

On the state of things, and his trial

May 31, 2024

Florida Man has some thoughts on the state of New York, and the country:

In the same building where he once descended down a golden elevator and embarked on a campaign that would forever change American politics, this morning Donald Trump lumbered up to the mic in New York City to launch napalm at all his enemies, particularly Judge Juan Merchan, Alvin Bragg and Michael Cohen — who he didn’t mention by name, other than calling him a “sleazebag” and saying that he didn’t qualify as a “fixer.”

The idea of a gag order for this man is so ridiculous, I love that they even tried to do it — the hubris! It was classic Trump: meandering, angry, darkly comic, rhetorical guns blasting away at everyone around him, golden hair blown out and wearing a bright crimson tie as wide as his head. The unprecedented nature of this moment is not lost on him, and the former president seemed stretched thin, exhausted after the long days in the courtroom. But the general mood was stubborn resolve in the face of his conviction, which he decried as a “scam” run by a judge who was a “tyrant.” He promised to fight on — “I’m wired in such a way,” Trump said. And he very obviously is.

So the thing that we all expected to happen, happened. There are all manner of predictions about the reactions to the verdict in Trump’s trial, but these predictions are really baseless, given the unprecedented nature of both the case and the political moment. But one thing seems absolutely clear: the Republican Party doesn’t need to spend anything on getting out the vote in 2024. They’ve got a built-in advantage that rivals and could exceed the post-Dobbs motivation for the Democratic side in 2022. Even Nikki Haley voters and former anti-Trump Republicans are going to be itching to go to the ballot box to fire back the only way they can. The momentum boost that Judge Merchan just gave the GOP is more than a billion-dollar ad campaign.

You’re waiting for the “but” and here it is: this is not an election that will be decided by Republican voters. It will be decided by Independents, and that is where we will have to wait for the political verdict that matters. For that, the Republicans are going to have to work to win an argument, one where the overwhelming force of the media will be on one side. They’ll have the resources to do it: Republican megadonors are utterly unfazed by this result, the NRSC had its biggest online donation day in history, and Trump had his own gigantic small-dollar donation boom.

The problem for Democrats in arguing the case to Independents is that it’s a total mess of a case. It’s been branded a hush-money trial, but it isn’t — it’s a business expense categorization trial, claimed as a campaign finance matter. This just doesn’t fly. It sounds like a rinky-dink case to the average voter. The Jack Smith documents case makes the most sense to people, on a practical level. But this one seems like the weakest attempt to take out Trump because it is. The Hillary Clinton campaign had to pay $113,000 in fines to the Federal Election Commission because they miscategorized their spending on the Steele Dossier — and that was a publicly filed claim with the government, not a behind the scenes accounting spreadsheet.

This moment is a hinge point for the United States. There is no question about it. The success or failure of the Trump 2024 campaign could redefine American politics or allow this type of lawfare utter vindication, proving that if you shop for the right jurisdiction with the right partisan judge, you can get anyone convicted, even a former president. It is an astounding moment, depressing in a way, but also good, in the same way the diagnosis of cancer or a brain tumor can be good. You know how bad it is. You know how awful it can be. But you also know what it will take to get through the bad to the good. That’s what 2024 may turn out to be: chemotherapy for a nation that needs it.

Related thoughts from smart people:

Things Fall Apart for Team Biden

Democrats had a plan for 2024, a plan that they executed very well at the beginning. They would unleash a barrage of legal challenges on Donald Trump, designed to render him unacceptable to all but the hardcore Republican base whose support would still vault him to the nomination of a GOP contest where his only competition was really Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. That plan succeeded perfectly, perhaps even faster than they wanted, given that the candidates never really had time to tear each other down. Step one: a major success.

Step two: use these assorted legal challenges to weigh down the Trump campaign with legal costs and distractions that pull him all over the country with hearings and pleadings and requirements to show up before various courts. This was at least a partial success, at first. But then came the collapse of the Fani Willis situation, the sustained appeals for delays and — most embarrassingly — the utter rejection of the attempt to remove Trump from the ballot, advocated for nearly universally by a set of dull-witted Democratic officials who couldn’t reckon with the consequences of their own actions. But hey, he’s still distracted, he’s still off the campaign trail, he’s still burning money on lawyers instead of ads… so step two: a middling success.

Then came step three: actually convict the guy on something, which every poll indicates is a major ding in the minds of Independent voters. This was supposed to be the easiest step. He’s Donald Trump after all, he has to be guilty of something. But somehow, some way, it turned out the only case where he’s actually getting close to a real verdict is the one case most Democrats find unappealing, because it depends on the business filing of an NDA payment to a former adult entertainer, and the judge is a clear partisan, and the main witness is a disgraced disbarred walking perjury charge in nut-crushingly tight pants, and it hinges on an old version of Quicken-like accounting software, and… it’s just so dissatisfying to anyone but the latest-night MSNBC host and the braindead ladies of The View. Step three: oof, couldn’t this have gone better?

The case hasn’t even been good for the people who pushed for it the most: the thoroughly corrupt anti-Trump media, who thought this parade of cases would turn into fascinating broadcasting the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days of O.J. Simpson or the Impeachments, all of them. Instead, well, just look at the numbers:

CNN’s average monthly viewership among the key 25-54 age demographic slipped to its smallest audience since 1991. The network brought in 96,000 average demo viewers for the month — with its previously lowest-rated month coming in March 2023 with 100,000 average demo viewers.

For Democrats who had counted on this three-step process as a no-brainer path to re-election for President Biden, reality is setting in — and it is coming hard:

All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.
“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely. But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said.

And some Democrats are even putting their names to it, publicly:

On the day after news broke that Biden had trailed Trump in fundraising last month, Massachusetts governor Maura Healey raised the pressure on donors as she introduced the president to a crowd of 300.
The cluster of fundraising events Biden attended in Boston that day were expected to bring in more than $6 million for his political operation. But Healey said that wasn’t good enough.
“To those of you who opened up your wallets, thank you,” said Healey, a Democrat in her first term. “We’d like you to open them up a little bit more and to find more patriots — more patriots who believe in this country, who recognize and understand the challenge presented at this time.”
Laughter rippled through the room. But Healey’s voice turned serious. With unusual urgency for Healey, the governor implored the room of high-dollar donors and local Democratic leaders to “think long and hard” about the stakes of the election.

In the end, it won’t come down to the donors, though. It’ll come down to Biden losing major ground among black voters, the failure of his efforts to hold on to Latino voters and his “glaring” problems with young voters. The same constituencies that Democrats have counted on as lockstep voters who really didn’t need much motivation or even an agenda that speaks to their priorities are tuning Joe Biden out. And, far too late in the game, Democrats are discovering there’s no step four for solving this situation.