What Will Trump's Conviction Mean?

When former prime minister Harold Macmillan was once asked by a reporter to identify his greatest challenge as prime minister, he supposedly responded, “Events, dear boy, events.” So too, it seems, with writing a weekly newsletter. We ended last week’s analysis of “Are we underrating Trump’s chances?” with a promise to look at the positive scenarios for Biden in this week’s edition. But we’d be completely remiss in our duties as an elections analyst were we to spend this week discussing something other than the fallout from the jury’s verdict in New York City. Of course, this is potentially one of the scenarios where things end up going well for Biden, so we aren’t completely off course. Regardless, we’ll return next week with the second part of our two-part series.

In the interest of full disclosure, this author is extremely skeptical regarding the merits of this case, as well as the conduct of the trial. That’s another column altogether, but it is sufficient to say here that if we believe Trump should be treated like any other defendant (a low bar for a former president, in my view), then this is a matter that clearly should never have been charged. This author is also on record stating that the other crimes with which Trump is charged are far more worthy and serious. However, because we can’t have nice things, it is extremely unlikely that they will go to trial before the election.

When we discuss the “fallout” from the jury’s verdict, we can use the term in (at least) three different senses. The first sense is immediate fallout. Fortunately, Adeline Von Drehle examines that very question later on in this newsletter. If you want to know what the immediate poll reaction is, she has the goods.

I’ll simply add that it can be difficult to really read anything into these polls in the short term. Major news stories can affect who will respond to pollsters, skewing the sample. I can imagine a scenario where some Republicans aren’t particularly eager to respond to MSM pollsters right now, which would result in polling estimates that are more favorable to the Democrats than the true electorate is. On the other hand, I can imagine Republicans being incredibly eager to respond to pollsters by giving them a piece of the Republicans’ mind right now, resulting in poll samples that are more favorable to Republicans than the true electorate is. There could be some combination of “all of the above,” causing everything to cancel out. We just can’t know.

Second, we can consider the medium-term effects of this conviction on the election. I doubt this will do much to alter perceptions among those who support Trump wholeheartedly. It certainly won’t give pause to those who support Biden. Instead, any effect will likely be limited to the so-called “double haters.” These voters are not fans of Biden’s but also dislike Trump. I think there are two groups here that have to be analyzed separately. 

The first grouping here is the “anti-anti-Trump” voters. These voters are high-information voters who tend to be conservative but don’t like Trump. Yet, unlike the NeverTrumpers, they don’t support what Democrats are doing either. Think of The Bulwark as “NeverTrump” and The Dispatch as more “anti-anti-Trump.” 

This likely has had an energizing effect on anti-anti-Trump voters, who dislike Trump but view this process as manifestly unjust. It is significant that Republicans like Susan Collins and Mitt Romney both came out and immediately blasted the verdict. It’s especially significant because Romney, whose political career is drawing to a close (in large part because of Trump), really has nothing to gain from doing anything to support Trump at this point. Put differently, to an anti-anti-Trump voter, this raises the salience of something that illustrates why, despite their dislike for Trump, they still aren’t on board with the Democrats.

The second group is harder to read. These are low-information voters who don’t pay much attention to politics. They’re also the ones who will ultimately decide this election. Think of the gas station attendant who votes once a decade, and this year happens to be his year because he accidentally shows up for work an hour early and decides to kill some time by voting at the school across the street.

This group isn’t likely to be moved by appeals to the unjustness of the verdict because there’s a reasonable chance they don’t know what the case is about. They just know the headlines that they read or see in passing on television: that Trump is guilty of a crime. One of the big challenges for the Trump campaign in the next few months is going to be reaching these voters and convincing them that the crime for which he was convicted was a trifling affair. The closest analogue would be the Clinton team in 1997-98 convincing voters that he was being impeached for receiving oral sex, rather than perjuring himself about oral sex. Whether Trump is able to do that, since he vigorously denies the affair, is another thing altogether.

Which brings us to the long term. It’s hard to predict these things ahead of time, but this seems like a watershed moment for the country. The closest analogue I can think of is the Clinton impeachment. There, Republicans had a president that they despised and to whom nothing seemed to stick. They finally found their hook in an unlikely place, when Clinton clearly perjured himself to cover up an affair with an intern; whether he obstructed justice or not is probably a closer call. 

The subsequent decision to impeach Clinton over this – where again, they at least technically had him dead-to-rights – coupled with the Democrats’ decision to circle the wagons around their embattled president, indisputably poisoned the national political dialogue in ways that reverberate today. It, along with the contested election in 2000 and the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003, are probably the three most consequential political moments of the past 30 years. Republicans had a feeling of catharsis from impeaching the president, but it turned out that their reward was nothing more than a proverbial mess of pottage and a country that would never be the same.

As we’ve discussed, it’s unclear whether there will be a benefit for Democrats this fall, but this historic conviction (for a crime that seems roughly as serious as the one behind Clinton’s perjury and obstruction of justice impeachment) will nevertheless have long-lasting ramifications. If Trump loses, Republicans will never accept the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency, writing it off to political maneuvering on the part of New York’s legal apparatus. The probability of political violence, even approaching a sort of low-grade civil war, while perhaps low in absolute terms, will nevertheless be far higher than anything I’ve previously considered plausible in my lifetime. If he loses and then the conviction is tossed on appeal, things will only be worse.

If Trump wins, maybe he will take the high road and fail to strike back, but I doubt it. I suspect things will be little better than if he were to lose. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are going to spend a lot of time in court. Letitia James and Alvin Bragg better have lived like monks for the past few decades. The full weight of the U.S. DOJ is coming down on them, and prosecuting former presidents and political opponents will become as commonplace as impeaching them seems to have become. Republicans won’t care about or buy principled distinctions between the DOJ bringing prosecutions and the Manhattan DA/New York AG doing so. Trump sure won't. 

So a major bridge has been burned. Maybe it was justified, and maybe it was worth it. But we do ourselves a disservice to carry on as if there’s somehow some possibility that maybe the bridge has survived intact.