Many voters say they don’t want a convicted felon in the White House. But do they mean it? And can prosecutors get to trial before the vote?
Can anything stop former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign juggernaut, now that Trump has all but crushed his GOP primary opponents and pulled ahead of President Joe Biden in national polls?
While November is a long time away, and plenty could happen before then, voters do say Trump has a massive weakness: A potential criminal conviction. In poll after poll, lots of voters who shrug off Trump’s four indictments say they wouldn’t support him if he’s convicted of a felony. If they mean it—or even if a big chunk of them do—they could easily be enough to keep him out of the White House.
What remains to be seen, of course, is whether they mean it—and, crucially, whether prosecutors can put Trump on trial in time for the rest of us to find out.
That makes prosecutors’ race against the clock one of the most important narratives of the 2024 election cycle, as teams of lawyers work feverishly around the country to overcome Trump’s efforts to gum up the gears of the judicial system and push the start-date of all his trials past November.
The Muller report was supposed to bring about the end of his presidency after having exposed his corruption and his crimes. A GOP base that has painted Russia as a boogeyman since at least the Cold War certainly wouldn’t tolerate a President suddenly colluding with the enemy, right? Right? Oh, wait. That’s right. Nobody cared.
January 6th was supposed to be the day the GOP said they had enough of Trump and it was time to move on from him. They literally stood in the House and Senate and said as much. And it took days before people like McCarthy were literally travelling back to Maralago to beg for forgiveness. From Trump. The insurrection is now viewed as little more than a peaceful demonstration and those involved are now considered ‘hostages’ from those exact same people.
The J6 hearings were supposed to present the case to the American people about how dangerous Trump was. Surely, once they saw the evidence for themselves, his base would…never mind. They wrote the whole thing off as a Democrat witch hunt.
But if criminal charges were brought against Trump, that would have to be enough! All we need is just one AG to pull the trigger. Other states would follow, and we’d be spending 2024 watching Trump squirm in courtroom after courtroom desperately trying to hang on to his freedom and his relevancy in front of judges and juries who…oh, that’s right. They’ve all just bent over for Trump at every possible opportunity, giving him exactly what he wants out of literal fear of retribution from his base. And the impact at the polls? Nonexistent as his base just wrote it off as an issue between him and a pornstar who is too unimportant to matter anyway.
Hey, you say, the other states did follow suit and start filing charges after Bragg got the ball rolling. How’s that working out? One judge has already professed to being in his pocket, has stated that she believes Trump deserves special treatment just for being Trump, and has deferred to Trump at literally every opportunity even at the risk of her professional reputation. The GA case is being dismissed by his base as political persecution by a DA who was having an affair, and the DC case is dragging its feet. And Trump’s polls have done nothing but go up, not down, with every court appearance as he has successfully been able to turn his court appearances into glorified campaign rallies as the judges just sit there and let it happen. (He has used his time on the stand and even took time during closing arguments to make political speeches and statements even after repeatedly being warned not to by the judges. And in every case, the judges decided not to follow through on their threats).
At this point, there is zero reason to believe a conviction would hurt him at all. In fact, he’d probably go up 5 points. His base is all in, and they’re barely even trying to hide the fact that it’s a cult at this point. They’re starting to go on TV and say the quiet part out loud: Trump is their leader, and if they have to choose between Trump and the founding principles of this country, they’ve chosen Trump.
I am very used to this arguing against Conservatives in Canada. The Canadian government is… Let’s just say generally less inflammatory and complicated than the American system because “states rights” are less of a duel between systems and more of a handshake.
All Conservatives have to do is throw wood on the fire of the fairly naturally occuring suspicion that a government isn’t following it’s own rules. To have those doubts takes no effort. People naturally resent being told what to do by an authority. Understanding how law works, what checks a government has on itself or understanding where an opinion is coming from and it’s place in the system is the antidote to understanding that your average Canadian does not live in a tyranny (Indigenous people do. Questions of whether stolen sovereignty and genocide makes power ultimately ethically legitimate is a whole different kettle of fish and we got more than a little reconciliation to do on that front. )
Take the trucker convoy that blockaded Ottawa for infectious disease restrictions. People were up in arms about the tyranny of the Federal government… But check the facts and understand the ecosystem that move is in the whole “we have no rights!” reaction starts sounding like bullshit.
The exercise of one of the harshest anti-sedition emergency protections existing in Canadian law that has never been used got activated for the first time. It required both provincial and federal governments to vote it in. It can remain active for a maximum of 90 days but was only active for less than 2 weeks.
The act required an independent inquiry be launched the moment it was voted in with the result presented before Parliament within a year. The people writing up the report for presentation had concern the French language half of the report (all official documents have to be in French and English in Canada) had concerns it would be up to standard so they put in for a paperwork duedate extension to the federal government that had to vote on whether that was okay before the deadline which ended up not being a problem anyway. The report does seem to show that the council the government recieved from Canadian intelligence and police had fairly high concerns of the level of armed civilians in the convoy, the large amount of money coming in from far right groups in the US and the blockade style seige that would impact the welfare and food security of the average citizenship of the places the blockades were in place.
The second half is that after this report launched a Court Justice raised concerns with the report about whether some of the actions taken were an over reach on Charter protections (Think the Canadian version of the Constitution) so the whole report will be reviewed by the Justices of the Supreme Courts with the Canadian government body as a defendant. If they lose this opens the Government to being sued by citizens for damages and creates needed precedent for the execution of the Emergencies Act.
This isn’t a tyranny. It’s a beaurcratic system working as intended. This is a government BEING a government. But all the Conservative media needs to do is withhold context. That paperwork extention request is suddenly “the government not playing by it’s own rules because it extended the act for more time without a vote”. The justice who raised concerns to trigger the full panel review of the report is " definitive proof the government did wrong!"
Conservative politicians here want people to believe they live under a tyranny because they are the opposition and they are gunna be slimy to try and get more seats at the next election… And it’s easy because understanding law in context even under easy baby mode here in Canada requires dedication to learn and understand complicated structures and how the law works on both a technical and philosophical level. They aren’t interested in educating people why this is normal. It doesn’t behoove them to do so.