Trumped

Yesterday, Trump was found guilty on all 34 charges. As you can imagine, the news and social media has gone bananas.

What’s interesting is that very little of the discourse is about the trial itself, or the facts presented. In fact, despite reading into it a bit from a few sources, I don’t really get it myself.

Here is what we have so far:

Trump had an affair with a (retired?) porn star called Stormy Daniels (her mother gave birth to her and pronounced, “behold, I shall call thee Stormy”). Fearing that this would weaken his election hopes, he paid Michael Cohen, the sleaziest lawyer in town, $120k to bribe Ms Daniels to not go public. Mr Cohen paid the money, Donald made him whole, and the story slipped away.

The issue at play here is that you can’t use campaign finances for personal expenses. Mr Trump did this, and then altered business documents to show he didn’t. That’s more or less the start and the end of it, although I may have missed some points.

The real outrage is based not around whether he did it, but the perceived belief that the investigation was politically motivated. It’s easy to see why.

To steel man the argument, it would go something like this: lots of presidents have done lots of immoral, dodgy, and possibly illegal activities. Some of those are similar to what happened with Trump; Bill Clinton famously paid off Paula Jones in a settlement many years ago and nothing came of it. Most sane minded people wouldn’t be against a president being tried for, say, murder, but this feels more like a “trumped” up charge that is being conducted for political reasons.

So what, and what next? The so what is that Trump has received a TON of donations in the last 24 hours, averaging over $2m an hour. The campaign team believes 1/3 of the donors are new donors, but who really knows. Either way, it has certainly galvanized support. Meanwhile, Biden is capitalizing on this moment by pivoting attention to the Middle East, the topic where 99% of Americans believe is a disaster, although for completely different reasons. Big brain move there.

The what next is more difficult. My guess is that 99% of Trump voters will vote Trump, and be invigorated to do so. The 99% of never trumpers will do the same and stick with Biden. The undecideds? They’ll probably forget all about it by November and be more influenced by gas prices. If there is a big shock like a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, or the fall of Ukraine, maybe something changes, but otherwise, the circus rolls on.