I thought this moment would bring me a lot more joy than it has. Sure, it was delightful to watch Pouting Prince Pantload slouch towards the cameras to spew his essentially pre-recorded bullshit about the trial being rigged, the judge being corrupt, the jury pool being Democrats, Biden being behind it all, blah blah blah – I can’t wait for the insane rants he’ll doubtless be spewing all night on his faux-Twitter social media site – and there’s a special satisfaction in contemplating the sentencing to come, so long as you don’t think about it too much (I very much doubt he’s ever bound for the five-bar motel, sadly, even if such a sentence is imposed at the trial level, which I also doubt, though fingers crossed).
So yeah, by rights it should be cork-popping time here at Needlefish HQ. For the first time in his long, dirty little life of grifting and criming, Orange Duce doesn’t skate. So why, to use again one of my favourite lines from Badlands, do I just feel kind of blah, like I’m sitting in the bathtub after all the water’s run out?
Well, first, let’s face it: who says he won’t yet skate on these charges? He still could, even in the best-case liberal scenario. Let’s assume, just to keep things simple, that Donald isn’t re-elected President in five months; the idea that a sitting President can’t be prosecuted while in office, a doctrine based not on the law but a Justice Department memo written over five decades ago, gets a little murky when it comes to State vs. Federal crimes, so let’s put that aside for the moment. We’ll get there. For now, assume that come 2025, Donald is just Citizen Trump. Is he screwed? You think? Nah. Not hardly. Recall, this is the American legal system, and that means process, process, process, with an extra healthy dollop of process, plus a supplemental dash or two of specially enriched, unpasteurized process. Conviction at trial is the beginning, not the end, and little more than the triggering event for interminable appeals, as we’ve seen over and over again with Donald. He likely won’t win in the New York courts, but think of the interlocutory motions, the legal maneuvering, sucking up months, and months, and more likely years, and then what happens? Here, again, things get murky because we’re dealing with State law, but what do you bet there’s a legal angle, some constitutional hook for Alito, Thomas et al. to hang their hats on, to ensure that after the State appeal verdict, it’s on to SCOTUS! In that case, how long does that take? Leave aside that the corrupt majority on the highest court might well find appealable error, and order a new trial or some such shit, we might not even get there before Donald reaches the end of his unnatural life, having kicked the can down the road until he’s run out the ultimate clock.
Yes, you object, but at the same time, supposing he’s not in the Oval, he’s got other, bigger problems. Even conceding all the factors that continually allow Donald to evade responsibility, there are those insurrection/election tampering/classified documents cases lurking out there, the very serious charges he faces in Georgia, Florida, and Washington, all now mired in process, for now, but all of which must at some point come back to haunt him, right? Right – BUT NOT IF SCOTUS GRANTS HIM ABSOLUTE PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, which, God save us, they might. That decision is still pending. I’m not sure if any such grant of immunity can extend to the New York State charges upon which Donald was convicted today, because he wasn’t the President when a lot of the criminal conduct occurred, though he was Chief Executive when most of the cheques were written, and whoo boy, there’s another American legal research project! But SCOTUS sure can get him off the hook on all the insurrection and stolen documents beefs, and while time was I would have been absolutely confident they wouldn’t take their oily MAGA loyalty to such an absurd length, in effect declaring the President a King and rendering the Constitution a dead letter, at this point I just don’t know. I just don’t believe anything is beyond them any more.
O.K., now let’s imagine that the tangerine tyrant does get himself elected President in November. That’s not at all unlikely, it seems. All the polls make it look like a coin toss, so far. So suppose it happens. What then? Well, then, even if SCOTUS says no to immunity, all the Federal cases go away either because Trump successfully pardons himself (more years of litigation), or he orders the DOJ to drop them, or because they’re all simply placed on indefinite hold because of that damnable memo from Justice that says you can’t go after a sitting President. Does that bind the States, and kill the Georgia and New York cases? Maybe not, but maybe yes, because the reasoning – that a President is far too busy and important to have his duties interrupted and his efforts impeded by criminal prosecution – should hold as well for State as Federal cases, and I suspect all it will take is for SCOTUS, eventually, to endorse the old Justice Department memo as settled constitutional law, with constitutional implications that have paramountcy over State laws, and are thus relevant at all levels (more legal research required, but look, there’s always an angle that gets Trump off the hook. Always.)
Trump probably won’t even have to abuse the power of his office to get to this happy outcome, though of course he will, on top of everything else, grievously abuse the power of the Presidency. In fact, he’ll do away with the whole frigging system. Believe it. Once he’s in there, he’s not going anywhere until they carry him out feet first. His GOP henchmen in Congress will see to his impunity in any constitutional crisis he chooses to foment, and if need be it’ll be pardons all around. End of the day, by hook or by crook, I think there’s no doubt about it: if Trump regains the White House, all legal proceedings against him go away, one way or another, and he dies in office, however long that takes. Even if he doesn’t further stack the Supreme Court, which he will.
So, the last big question, the answer to which might not even be dispositive, is can Donald, now a convicted felon, get himself re-elected in November?
What do you think?
True, there are grounds for reasonable hope on this score. Polls, including polls of Republican primary voters this year, have repeatedly shown that dyed-in-the-wool Republican voters of some significant percentage won’t vote for Donald if he’s been convicted of crimes. Not a huge percentage. But not insignificant. Maybe 4-6%. Sometimes quite a bit more, and if those who were still voting for Nikki Haley after she pulled out of the primary are all inclined to abandon Donald, the figure rises into double digits. I’ve seen the focus group interviews. They swear up and down they’ll vote for Biden if Trump is a felon come election day. If that’s true, it might be enough to determine the results in those crucial swing States where the margins of victory – the margins determining the governance of 320 million Americans – typically number in the mere tens of thousands.
Is it true, though? I find it difficult to believe. The Trump cult is powerful, and the entire GOP has been working feverishly to assure its base that the American justice system is rigged, that the prosecution of Donald is in fact a politically-motivated program of persecution run out of Biden’s White House, and that any result that goes against Donald is illegitimate. It’s an approach that’s worked so far. Why wouldn’t it work now? For the love of Christ, these people believe an entire general election was rigged. Why would they balk at the idea that an isolated trial in New York State was rigged too, especially since a stream of Republican politicians, including, most horrifyingly, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson himself, have shown up to stand before the Press outside the New York court house and condemn the entire American justice system as biased and corrupt?
Think about it: the man second in line to the Presidency proclaiming to the American people that the nation’s entire justice system is nothing but a rigged, Third World hive of scum and villainy determined to crucify poor, innocent Donald Trump for things that aren’t even crimes, while the professional nitwits at Fox, and Newsmaxx, and OANN egg him on and amplify his nonsense.
It’s the moral equivalent of sedition, but it’s powerful, as is every message that conveys to people exactly what they most want to hear.
I guess I just don’t buy the polling. I don’t believe that any meaningful percentage of Republican voters will abandon Donald just because some court in New York, Democratic Blue State hotbed that it is, managed to impose a guilty verdict on Dear Leader. So it all comes down to the low-information swing voters, that small percentage who voted for Obama before pulling the lever for Donald, the ones who voted for the fictional character they saw on The Apprentice, and hew to no particular political party or ideology. You know – the morons. Maybe some of those will be scared off by the idea of a felon in the White House, supposing they bother to vote. With so many crucial States likely to be won or lost on the votes of fewer people than attend the average ball game, maybe that’ll make a difference. I’d like to think so, but the thing is, the analytics suggest that Trump always comes out on top with the low-information segment of the electorate, probably because MAGA/Republican messaging is usually so powerful. Maybe, this time, there will be just enough people who can’t get past the idea of a convicted criminal, a man prohibited by federal law from owning a gun, in possession of the nuclear codes.
As inured as we’ve all become to the warped physics of the Trumpiverse, it still feels strange to have reached the point where that’s about all we can hope for, doesn’t it? Look, OK, I’m an old bastard with fond memories of a happier time long past, but c’mon, It wasn’t that long ago when Gary Hart’s political aspirations went up in smoke because he was caught on camera with a pretty girl sitting on his lap. Good lord! The scoundrel was having an affair! Pity his poor wife! Now we’ve got an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon, whose crimes stemmed from a tryst with a porn star conducted while his wife sat at home with a newborn son, and his supporters couldn’t give a rat’s ass.
I may feel better about this in days to come. It would be nice to be wrong, this time. Yet right now, this verdict, I fear, means nothing, and will come to nothing.
Oh, for the good old days.
Post-script: On The Other Hand…
the needlefish 