Could Teflon Don lose his grip on a third of the country because 12 twelve ordinary Americans did their duty, even the one who said he gets all his news from Truth Social? When Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts of masterminding a scheme, it exposed him for all to see as a “loser” like the war hero who got captured, the “sucker” son of Gold Star parents who could have been making money instead of dying in combat. Neither his eldest daughter nor his latest wife stood by Trump. He’s no longer the Lothario of Access Hollywood, boasting he can do what he wants to women because he’s a star.
Test the waters, Donald, shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and see if you get away with it. It may be too much to dream of, but might this fusillade of guilty, guilty, guilty mean the bad guy’s washed up? Could there be comeuppance for hiding nuclear secrets in his bathroom, for claiming Biden sent the FBI, locked and loaded, to take him out for it, for asking a Republican official to find 11,870 votes, for inflating his assets to trick his bankers, and for deflating them to trick the IRS? Last week’s verdict proves what Thomas Paine wrote: In some countries, the King is the law. In America, the law is king.
Still, in Trump’s America, Democrats are so used to losing they expect it even as they watch the slavishly devoted Hope Hicks lower the hammer on her former boss and the Dickensian-named David Pecker describe his Trump protection racket.
There’s some chance what happened in Judge Juan Merchan’s over-air-conditioned courtroom will seep into MAGAland. Twenty percent of voters have consistently voted for anyone but Trump in GOP primaries so far. If he loses more than that in the last round of primaries, that portends trouble in the general. Before the verdict, polls had 25 percent bailing on a convicted felon. Post verdict that dropped to one in 10 Republicans saying they were less likely to vote for Trump. Half of Americans in an ABC News/Ipsos poll believe the verdict was correct. A Morning Consult poll found that a significant minority of Republicans and Independents want him to drop out.
Will any of the disillusionment hold, or does Trump become ‘my convicted felon?‘ The unkempt and weary convict went on an unhinged morning-after rant that was partly contrived. Sure, he was angry, but only because he got caught. If he had the $130,000 to pay off Stormy Daniels again, he would. It was the best money he ever spent. Without keeping that assignation from voters–even if it hadn’t come after Mike Pence and mother spent a weekend mulling whether to stay on a ticket with a man who described where he grabbed women–it was over for him. Without the untraceable money to Daniels, there would have been no Trump on Air Force One.
Without a cover-up, we may have had President Hillary Clinton and that Tim Kaine guy. But a cover-up there was, a Hillary there wasn’t. Along with a million more deaths from COVID, there was a bromance with Putin, $400 million in arms withheld from Ukraine, tax cuts for the rich, an attempt to overturn the election from the White House, a violent one to do it by invading the Capitol.
Democrats are pessimistic by nature. Like children often sent to their rooms without dessert, they can’t believe the national nightmare that started on a golden escalator going down won’t carry Trump up again so he can fill the civil service with MAGA meatheads, hand over the Justice Department to coup legal theorist John Eastman, reinstate Steve Bannon in his West Wing office with a place nearby for the guy who carried boxes of classified documents from one gilded Mar-a-Lago room to another. Mike Flynn will fight it out with Eric for National Security Advisor (the younger Trump learned a lot about foreign policy on his visits to Trump properties in Uruguay and Scotland) while his wife Lara runs the Republican National Committee into the ground.
We’ve been to other forks in the road. After the president incited the January 6 mob, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy took to the floor to condemn it. Then the polls came in, and so did fear that Trump would keep his hold over the base and the media. When McCarthy was asked on CNN Sunday if it was a good idea for his party to nominate a convicted felon for president, he replied, “A 100 percent yes.”
Every word Trump uttered at the 100 Centre Street courthouse was broadcast live, including those denigrating the judge and jury, by a press corps that still treats him like a normal candidate. His entry into the Guinness World Book of Records as the first ex-president to assume convicted felony status gives them another hook. The morning-after programming was interrupted to take his press conference live. But, to their credit, except for Fox News, the networks eventually cut away when they realized A. It wasn’t a press conference, and B. It was another con job.
Trump’s power derives not from allies but from subjects prostrate in fear he will primary them. It takes two hands to count his failures that would have included The Apprentice if he hadn’t switched from TV mogul to TV presidential candidate in the nick of time. Personally, he’s a mess. The 77-year-old has no friends other than subservient aides bound by Omerta, whose loyalty he pays for–and abuses. At one time, Michael Cohen would have done anything for The Boss. It was unthinkable that he would ever tape a call or turn state’s evidence. But the cruelties piled up. Trump went out of his way to humiliate Cohen, most memorably at his son’s Bar Mitzvah, where the mogul arrived insultingly late and told the assembled guests that he wouldn’t have deigned to be there at all if he, his secretary, and his kids hadn’t been besieged by Cohen’s desperate pleas. That’s a wound that only deepens over time.
But for his mean spirit and his father’s temperament, Trump might be sailing to his coronation in Milwaukee. Instead, he’s facing a sentencing hearing four days before the Republican convention, his Truth Social stock is in the tank, and Melania is busy studying her prenup to see if she’s obligated to make conjugal visits. Ivanka is AWOL. Jared is playing grown-up businessman with the $2 billion bounty collected from the Saudis. When Judge Merchan granted Trump time off for his son’s high school graduation, Dad briefly stopped by Barron’s Florida commencement before jetting to headline a fundraiser in Minnesota.
After the verdict, news helicopters followed Trump’s SUV as it inched through rush hour traffic to his eponymous tower, which is not, in fact, as high as a man who wears lifts in his shoes says it is. The 45th president’s heroes are Al Capone, Roy Cohn, and boxer Ryan Garcia, yet he now cuts a figure closer to that of Lil’ Marco Rubio, who may be Trump’s vice president if he sheds what’s left of his principles.
But before Rubio uproots his family to constitutionally qualify to run with a fellow Floridian, he should study the testimony of the trial’s witnesses. Review the abject statements of congressmen in Trump costume lined up outside court pledging allegiance. To do less would be to find themselves out of office and back home, spending way too much quality time with their families. See the evangelicals in line, anti-contraceptive yet pro-adultery, ignoring all ten commandments and Two Corinthians to worship at the altar of their false god.
Yet, the money keeps flowing from those who are convinced that only Trump can save them in the alternate universe he’s created. “We’re in a rigged system, folks,” he insists at every rally. The polls, the voting machines, and the Commission on Presidential Debates. All rigged. And don’t forget the NFL’s schedule. Will his cult ever realize he’s the charlatan doing the rigging?
Will he do time? It’s possible enough that in a Truth Social screed Sunday, Trump issued an order to the high court to intervene in his “Sentencing” for not having done anything wrong that will “determine the future of our Nation.” Trump concluded, “The United States Supreme Court MUST DECIDE!”
Will both federal trials against him be derailed? Almost assuredly thanks to a Florida judge who puts her robe on one slow sleeve at a time and the highly conflicted high court that includes Clarence Thomas, whose wife recruited slates of phony electors, and Samuel Alito, whose wife flies flags over their two homes sympathetic to the Proud Boys. At oral argument on presidential immunity, the group conjured up outlandish scenarios of what would happen should a president not be granted free reign to commit crimes in office.
Trump has six months to convince a majority (or a minority bolstered by recounts, court challenges, and, if need be, riots) to return him to the White House. There, despite Paine’s common-sense assessment, King Trump will be the law.
