One of DC’s most important conveyors of conventional wisdom, John Harris of Politico, says something unexpected:
Yes, it’s obviously true that a 34-count felony conviction would be enough to demolish the career of any normal politician.
Yes, it’s obviously true that former president Donald Trump is not a normal politician. His most devoted partisans will only become more so following Thursday’s guilty verdict. Just as they did after the Access Hollywood tape, the impeachments, the Jan. 6 riot and other examples too abundant to recount or, for many people, even to recall.
But these two obvious truths tend to obscure another one. Trump simply cannot beat President Joe Biden relying solely on the votes of people who think his legal travails are a politically motivated scam, and who cheer Trump not in spite of his transgressions but because of them. Or, more specifically, because they thrill to the outrage and indignation Trump inspires among his adversaries.
There are plenty of such people — enough to power this generation’s most important political movement — but still not enough to win the election. Trump’s only path to victory is a coalition that includes many Republicans and independents who find him deplorable but think a second Biden term would be even more so.
That is why — even as the full consequences likely will emerge slowly — this week was easily the worst so far this year for Trump and the best for Biden.
This doesn’t mean the Manhattan verdict will suddenly transform the race — nothing in Trump’s history of scandal suggests it will. This doesn’t mean huge legions of swing voters will suddenly agree with Biden’s argument that democracy itself is on the ballot this fall. If someone wasn’t buying that up until now, why would a case of document falsification to cover up an alleged sexual indiscretion change their mind?
It does mean that many voters who don’t much like Biden received an emphatic, unambiguous reminder of why they don’t like Trump. The movement of even a small percentage of voters in closely contested swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all must-win for Biden — could echo decisively through the balance of the race.
I’m sure that Republicans will commission some snap polls which say the opposite and many in the Washington establishment will immediately rush to say that Trump is more popular than ever now that he’s a convicted felon. But hopefully this epiphany by Harris is indicative of a bigger phenomenon among the DC cognoscenti. It simply can’t be good that a presidential candidate is an adjudicated criminal. If that’s the case then our culture is totally lost.