Tweet Share Share Comment With less than a year now remaining until the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump spent Monday doing what he does best, or at least most frequently: defending himself from charges of fraud.
The setting was a Manhattan courtroom, where he and the Trump Organization face state-level civil charges of lying about the value of assets in order to secure more-favorable terms on loans and insurance policies. It’s not the most dramatic of Trump’s scandals, nor is it likely to be the most consequential for him personally, given that he faces actual jail time in the cases in which he’s accused of mishandling classified documents and conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. It does, however, involve a few details that speak to the characteristically half-amusing, half-abhorrent way he looms perpetually over public life in the United States.
For one, a primary witness against Trump in this case is Michael Cohen, who was the former president’s attorney and most aggressive spokesman until he went to jail for committing crimes on Trump’s behalf and became a kind of all-purpose anti-Trump activist and whistleblower. One law of Trump studies is that on a long-enough time scale, everyone who works for or tries to ally themselves with him—lawyers, chiefs of staff, vice presidents—eventually ends up in this role. The fraud allegations also involve a pantheon-level DJT falsehood, namely the claim made on multiple documents that his 10,996-square-foot New York City apartment was actually 30,000 square feet—a lie that could have been easily debunked at any time by, like, looking at the building in which it was located.
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Concurrently, the New York Times reports that, according to polls conducted with Siena College, Trump is more popular than President Joe Biden with registered voters in five swing states. In sum, like always, Trump is being shown to have committed some or other fraudulent or unethical act in a way that is not affecting his chances of being (or remaining) president.
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About eight years ago, in fact, during his first Republican primary, he was experiencing almost exactly the same type of situation. Two class-action suits and a civil suit—the latter brought, like the asset-inflation case, by the attorney general of New York State—accused him of defrauding “students” of Trump University, which offered exorbitantly priced real-estate seminars of dubious value taught by instructors with limited or no experience in the field. He was confronted about the accusations during a primary debate, and responded with a series of lies and evasions. My post about the situation, linked above, evinces a quaint and frankly embarrassing sense of satisfaction that he’d faced a comeuppance on national television. I even listed all the other offensive things he’d done during the campaign previously, hinting at the possibility that he’d hit a tipping point and was in danger of losing the polling lead he enjoyed at that point over Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Gov. Marco Rubio, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
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But none of those candidates ever threatened his path to the nomination. The other and even more iron law of Trump studies is that thanks to contemporary polarization and his successful enforcement of “deep-state persecution” as the Republican party line on his legal problems, there isn’t ever a landslide away from him. If Biden wins next year—which is still a strong possibility—his victory will probably be a narrow one.
Then again, the Times followed up its swing-state polling story this weekend with another piece, which notes that 6 percent of Trump supporters in the survey said they’d vote for Biden instead if Trump is convicted of any of the criminal charges he faces. That would be a huge swing, creating a double-digit general-election polling deficit that could lead either to a November rout or, if it happens early enough, to the Republican base losing its belief that Trump can beat Biden and nominating someone else instead.
Sure. Sure it could.
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- 2024 Campaign
Two Key Things We’ve Learned About Trump, a Year out From the Election
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07.11.2023
Tweet Share Share Comment With less than a year now remaining until the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump spent Monday doing what he does best, or at least most frequently: defending himself from charges of fraud.
The setting was a Manhattan courtroom, where he and the Trump Organization face state-level civil charges of lying about the value of assets in order to secure more-favorable terms on loans and insurance policies. It’s not the most dramatic of Trump’s scandals, nor is it likely to be the most consequential for him personally, given that he faces actual jail time in the cases in which he’s accused of mishandling classified documents and conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. It does, however, involve a few details that speak to the characteristically half-amusing, half-abhorrent way he looms perpetually over public life in the United States.
For one, a primary witness against Trump in this case is Michael Cohen, who was the former president’s attorney and most aggressive spokesman until he went to jail for committing crimes on Trump’s behalf and became a kind of all-purpose anti-Trump activist and whistleblower. One law of Trump studies is........
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