[Julia had a nice item ready to go for today, but we’re holding that for a day when you’ll all want to read it. Worth the wait! Meanwhile, her quick comments on the news are — UPDATE — up at Politco as part of their roundup. Here’s the must click-link. Here, David has several comments on the big news, and then I tagged in for one additional thought.]
{David here:]
Herewith a few observations on the guilty verdicts (oh so many guilty verdicts) against Donald Trump:
I love American popular sovereignty and all that kind of stuff. Throughout this trial (and its immediate aftermath), commentators constantly refer to ordinary citizens as “peers” of the holder of our highest, most powerful federal office. In my somewhat jingoistic opinion, every utterance of this phrase is a world-changing act that validates the importance and greatness of the American democratic experience. Don’t become inured to it! American principles of equality rock!
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.
White collar crime, including campaign law violations, are serious. My inner Marxist, class-warfare voice doesn’t get much exercise, but it does occasionally burst to the fore when we differentiate between serious crime—meaning violent and property crime—and not-so-serious crime that people in suits do in offices. (Did you know that there was an effort during the Obama years to change crime classifications so that when you look up a city’s Part 1 crime rate it would include major white collar crimes? Sigh.) One of the reasons a lot of people lamented this being the first (and likely only) criminal case before the election—and why so little was made of Trump’s civil fraud conviction-is that we don’t really consider that stuff real crime. (You know, like the crime supposedly commited by scary migrants.)
It might affect the election, or not, whatever. I can imagine all sorts of ways this might end up playing in the campaign. It’s all just speculation and theorizing. We might never really know. Let it go. Don’t focus on it. It is what it is—and it certainly wasn’t the reason to prosecute him.
[Jonathan here:]
I covered several things in my item yesterday, which despite the title (Waiting for the Jury…) is still as relevant now; I basically wrote it expecting a guilty verdict.
At this point, I’ll just add that it occurs to me that a fair number of voters who don’t pay much attention to politics may assume that, well, now that he’s been convicted, he won’t be the Republican candidate. Those who do pay attention know that’s not true.
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.