The big news this week, of course, is that former (and perhaps future) president Donald Trump was found guilty of... something. Few people can name the exact charges, I suspect, but they do know it was a felony, and that he was found guilty by a jury of his peers. I'm not even totally sure if I could tell you the exact charges, and I've been following the case somewhat closely. I think it's misdemeanor fraud -- falsifying business documents -- that got elevated to a felony because it was in service of another crime, a campaign finance violation. It went down as such... Trump paid Michael Cohen a bunch of money to kill the Stormy Daniels story, but he documented it as a fee for legal services, which it wasn't, so that's the misdemeanor fraud. However, when Trump paid Cohen, he was actually repaying him. Cohen initially fronted the money, $130K, to the Trump campaign, which was a campaign finance law as Cohen could only legally contribute $2,700, as an individual. This latter crime bumped up the fraud to a felony. I hope I got that right.
Laid out this way, it does seem pretty contrived and ticky-tack, which is why even many Trump haters did not like this case. Trump is a criminal, to be sure, but his real crime has nothing to do with hush-money payments to an adult film actress -- it's conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.* I mean, he is on tape asking the AG of Georgia to "find" him more votes, for Pete's sake. That Fulton County RICO case is really the one we need to go forward. Unfortunately, however, it's on pause as an appeals court reviews an appeal by Trump's team of a judge's decision to allow Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to stay on the case. Willis is alleged to have had (and, let's be honest, almost certainly did have) a romance with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, creating the appearance of a conflict of interest, even though Wade formally withdrew from the case.
*There is also the classified documents case, which is also more serious and straightforward than the New York case. Unfortunately, Trump got a very amenable (to him) judge in that case -- one he appointed -- who appears intent on delaying it until after the election.
As an aside, Fani Willis is a major part of the first episode of a new, really good podcast called Reflector. She's been prosecuting rappers like Young Thug on RICO charges and using their lyrics against them. This is controversial, as it's not clear if the lyrics are boasts about real-life crimes or statements of artistic fiction. I tend to agree with Willis that such lyrics are fair game -- why shouldn't they be? -- and she comes off as pretty badass, overall. I just wish she had better judgement and assigned somebody other than the guy she was shtupping to one of highest-stakes criminal cases in American history.
So, back to Trump, yeah, I do understand the people who say the New York case against him was weak and politically motivated. It was undoubtedly both those things. I mean, Alvin Bragg basically ran his reelection campaign on the promise to prosecute Trump. With that said, it was still 100% a legitimate case within our criminal justice system. Proper procedure was followed. Both sides presented their cases, and a jury of 12 people (signed off on by Trump's defense team, I might add) found is favor of the prosecution. That's how it goes. That's how our courts work and how they are designed to work. Yes, New York is a reliably blue city, but Biden "only" won it 76%-23% in 2020, which means we would expect, by random chance, three of the 12 jurors to be Trump voters. It was a unanimous decision against him.
Would Trump have been convicted if he wasn't Trump? Maybe not, but he is Trump, so what difference does it make? The point is: Regardless of what anybody thought going into the trial, he got his day in court, he got a fair hearing before a jury of his peers, and he lost. He has nobody to blame but himself, even though we all know he will blame everybody but himself. Also, he might win on appeal. That’s part of the system, too.
The big question everybody is wondering now is, What effect will this have in November? But it's not something anybody can answer with any certitude. I'm very wary of anybody making grand predictions about this election. Trump was definitively leading in the polls in the swing states before this verdict dropped, and I don't expect things to change drastically. However, things don't need to change drastically to tip the odds in Biden's favor, and, most importantly, we still have five months to go and things change in five months. Nate Cohn,* whom I trust as much as anybody to provide disinterested fact-based analysis, has two recent articles on the topic I found interesting.** It's weird, I feel like we're kinda in the reverse situation of 2016, in which much of the media and the public was reading the polling data as if it was a foregone conclusion that Clinton would win, and the smart analysts were saying, Hold on, now, this thing is actually much closer than people think. We can only hope this reverse analogy extends all the way to the end.
*By the way, have you ever noticed how much Nate Cohn looks like a young Mo Rocca? Probably not because most people have never heard of either of these guys.
**One salient point in the articles is that Trump has likely benefited a great deal from being out of the spotlight -- few people were even paying attention to this trial -- while the focus has been primarily on Biden's problems with inflation, the border, the war in Gaza, etc. What this verdict could do, if nothing else, is remind voters of how sick we all were of Trump (and from Covid) four years ago.
Well, I think I've spilled enough virtual ink on this topic for now. Until next time...
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