Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Donald Trump is now a convicted felon, found guilty by a jury of his peers in the city in which he was born and raised and lived for the first 70 years of his life. The front page of his former hometown newspaper looked like this today:

Republicans have all rallied in support of the Dear Leader by whining and complaining about the judicial system being used against a political opponent, apparently trying to convince the American people that anyone running for office should be immune from prosecution for their crimes. (That’s pretty rich coming from the crowd that chanted “lock her up” for four solid years.) Needless to say, every one of the lawsuits filed against him and the crimes he is accused of were being very publicly investigated long before he decided to run for president again. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that that’s why he did it. As the LA Times Doyle McManus pointed out back in October of 2021:

As long as he’s running (or even sort of running), Trump can denounce every inquest and subpoena as just another part of a political vendetta. It’s a way to hold his troops together — and to make every prosecutor think twice.

He didn’t have to run for president. There were a whole bunch of Republicans who ran against him in the primaries, ready and willing to take on the job. But Trump needed to run so that he would be able to say to himself and others that all these civil and criminal cases against him aren’t his fault.

The problem for Trump is that reality is finally catching up to him. His Big Lies may be working on his cult following but they don’t work in a court of law where real evidence is presented and ordinary people and experienced jurists are charged with weighing the facts to determine the truth. Trump has lost every single legal proceeding brought against him in the last three years.

The Trump Organization was found guilty of 17 felonies, landing his CFO in jail. He lost two defamation cases brought by E. Jean Carroll. He lost the mammoth New York civil fraud case. And now he’s lost his first criminal trial with a sweeping guilty verdict on all 34 felony counts. The pending cases in DC, Georgia and Florida may not end up being adjudicated before the election but if he loses in November they will likely go ahead and there’s a very good chance he’ll lose those as well (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t decide to fully sacrifice what’s left of its credibility to spare him.)

You would think that a man this rich and powerful would have such good legal representation that state prosecutors and judges would be no match for them. Think about OJ Simpson and his Dream Team. So why is Trump’s team so lame? I think most legal observers would say that it’s because Trump is such a terrible client who demands that his lawyers follow his lead and that’s a very bad way to conduct a defense.

Consider how it’s worked out for him so far. Trump stayed fairly hands off from the first E. Jean Carroll trial which he lost and had to pay Carroll $5 million dollars. He obviously wasn’t happy about that and his lawyer Joe Tacopina abruptly resigned on the eve of the second one. Trump decided to take the case in hand personally and replaced him with his favorite TV lawyer Alina Habba who, along with Trump, had already been sanctioned for almost a million dollars in a case Trump brought against the Clintons which the judge called “completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose.” Trump acted out in the courtroom whenever he attended the trial, even flouncing out of the courtroom at one point, and Habba mirrored his behavior, irritating the judge and the jury as well which awarded Carroll $83.3 million dollars, $65 million of which was in punitive damages.

He performed the same rude and disruptive dance in the New York State fraud case, resulting in a gag order and sanctions for violating them. Trump was clearly in charge of that case too even to the extent that Habba pasted on his grim mug shot expression every time she came before the cameras. He clearly believed that his case should be tried as if it was his Truth Social feed. That didn’t work out too well either. He was found liable to the tune of nearly half a billion dollars.

The assumption was that his first criminal trial would be different. He would be required to attend the trial every day it was in session and he’d hired some real lawyers this time. But it was soon obvious that he was still running the show. It wasn’t just that he was outside the courthouse slamming the judge and the prosecutor every single day, which no defense lawyer would think makes a lot of sense. He also got himself sanctioned again for violating his gag order against discussing witnesses, jury members or family members of court employees which was just plain stupid. But It was undeniable that Trump was dictating the way they argued the case as well.

For instance, any lawyer would have said that Trump should just stipulate to the tryst with Stormy Daniels so they could avoid the whole spectacle of her testimony. But Trump insisted that they deny it ever happened. And when she was cross examined by Trump’s attorney, he also obviously wanted them to try to make her look like a liar instead of simply asking her if she knew anything about the records at the Trump organization and when she said no, just letting it go. After all, that’s what the case was about.

By contrast he wouldn’t let them go hard after David Pecker, his buddy who also happens to have a box full of papers that Trump believes might incriminate him in god-only-knows-what. They treated him like he was their witness when, in fact, his testimony was pivotal to the prosecution The same with his former gal friday Hope Hicks. Any lawyer who wasn’t being hamstrung by his client would have tried to shake their testimony.

And then there was Robert Costello, the friend-of-Rudy’s who made a complete mess of the case and should never have been called to testify. He ended up making Michael Cohen look as respectable as a monk by comparison. That was almost certainly Trump’s doing after seeing Costello testify before the MAGA Republicans in the House the week before. (His crude, bombastic style was like looking in the mirror.)

Trump’s lead lawyer Todd Blanche appeared on Fox and CNN after the verdict and had nothing but great things to say about Trump. But he did make it crystal clear that Trump was in charge of the case.

Don’t think this one needs a fact check https://t.co/vVPRTTGt7B

— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) May 31, 2024

He also said that Trump was very much involved with jury selection and told Kaitlan Collins on CNN that they mutually decided that Trump shouldn’t take the stand. Blanche seemed a little bit shell-shocked and is probably exhausted but he pretty much admitted that Trump was running the defense strategy. You have to wonder if he will be with Trump much longer.

All of this just illustrates what we already know. Trump is a domineering bully who doesn’t know how to run anything and won’t listen to anyone, whether it’s a legal defense or the U.S. government. You’d think after losing all these elections, civil cases and now criminal trials Republicans would get it through their heads that this man who calls everything a hoax and a fake, is actually talking about himself.

That was a moment, wasn’t it?

Watching MSNBC’s Guilty/Not Guilty counter click its way up to 34 Trump guilty verdicts was a moment I won’t forget. I heard about the 9/11 attack in New York from a colleague who’d heard of it in a phone call from home. I thought it must have been an internet rumor. Then I couldn’t even connect to the internet to check. It wasn’t a rumor. Neither was yesterday’s verdict.

BREAKING: Donald Trump found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business documents in New York pic.twitter.com/Yq8LWihvRx

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 30, 2024

So. What does it mean?

Well, Donald John Trump is a felon 34 times over. His cult is pissed (Reuters):

Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.

After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.

Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.

Friends in the Democratic Party last night began receiving threats via phone messages and emails.

David Frum:

We’re seeing here the latest operation of a foundational rule of the Trump era: If you’re a Trump supporter, you will sooner or later be called to jettison any and every principle you ever purported to hold. Republicans in Donald Trump’s adopted state of Florida oppose voting by felons. They used their legislative power to gut a state referendum restoring the voting rights of persons convicted of a crime. But as fiercely as Florida Republicans oppose voting by felons, they feel entirely differently about voting for felons. That’s now apparently fine, provided the felon is Donald Trump.

Freedom’s just a MAGA word for no principles left to lose.

Texas Tribune:

WASHINGTON — Texas Republicans rallied to former President Donald Trump’s defense Thursday after a Manhattan jury convicted him on 34 felony charges related to falsifying business records to cover a sex scandal.

“This was a sham show trial. The Kangaroo Court will never stand on appeal. Americans deserve better than a sitting U.S. President weaponizing our justice system against a political opponent— all to win an election,” Gov. Greg Abbott said on social media. “We must FIRE Joe Biden in November.”

This contrast in how both @JeffJacksonNC and @danbishopnc react to someone in their respective parties getting hit with criminal charges tells you exactly who's a hyperpartisan hack, and who's a leader. https://t.co/keH2OmjDl5 pic.twitter.com/RbkRHwlq8z

— Carolina Forward (@ForwardCarolina) May 31, 2024

Brian Beutler:

• Anyone who showed enough curiosity to learn how the somewhat obscure law Trump violated works, and how broadly it’s applied, has known for a long time now that this prosecution was well-predicated. The fact that Trump’s purpose in forging business documents was to gain an illegal leg-up in the election made the prosecution civically righteous.
• Alvin Bragg’s liberal critics should acknowledge their mistakes, even if they believe their initial instinct to be skeptical of his case was well-intended.
• Other people who should acknowledge their mistakes: The many, many prosecutors, judges, congressmen, and senators who have shown far less courage than Bragg, Judge Juan Merchan, and the 12 jurors who rendered this verdict, knowing it has put them at somewhat greater risk of retribution.
• Donald Trump isn’t just a felon, he’s also a disgrace. Like basically all politicians who get convicted of felonies he should withdraw from politics. If it were a Democratic presidential nominee, his career would be over. It won’t happen, but that’s what would be proper. Democrats should say so freely.
• Because he won’t withdraw from the race, Democrats and the rest of us should follow the logic of his conviction wherever it leads. Trump should be denied classified candidate briefings, just as felons are disqualified from classified clearance. Trump should be denied the right to vote in his home state of Florida, and if Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans try to create a special exception for him, Democrats should challenge it. They should feel free to demand he be punished to the full extent of the law.
• Speaking of which, Juan Merchan should give Trump a stiff sentence. Trump behaved lawlessly, the impact of his crimes was vast, and he was extraordinarily contemptuous during trial. However, Merchan went on record to acknowledge that he was reluctant to jail Trump. He should set that aside and treat Trump like any other defendant. If 12 random New Yorkers had the courage to do what they did, he should show similar mettle.

America is a nation built upon the rule of law. The jury has spoken and carefully rendered a decision. Responsible leadership requires the verdict to be respected.

— Hakeem Jeffries (@RepJeffries) May 30, 2024

You can have Trump or you can have America, MAGAstan. Your choice,

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Convicted like you’ve never seen before

It’s a first America doesn’t need, and yet it does.

The Washington Post reports yesterday’s news:

Donald Trump was convicted Thursday on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his New York state hush money case, becoming the first former U.S. president to be tried and found guilty of a crime.

All of America watched in the aftermath of the Great Recession as its architects in the finance industry took home bonuses even as they took back the homes of families to whom they’d sold “No income, no asset” (NINA) loans, a.k.a. “liar loans.” The Department of the Treasury under Barack Obama “foamed the runway” for the banks to prevent hard landings in the crisis. But it left homeowners out in the cold. The Department of Justice looked the other way.

The officials “at the very center of the 2008 crash — former Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and former head of the New York Fed and Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner,” wrote Ryan Cooper in 2018, wanted their successors to have “quiet authoritarian power to make sure financial elites like themselves do not pay for their misdeeds.”

You noticed? So did the rest of us.

The system was rigged, Elizabeth Warren said even before becoming a U.S senator. It wasn’t just conservative panic over shifting demographics and the election of the country’s first Black president that led in 2016 to the election of a chaos agent — Trump — as president. It was the sense that the elite are above the law, as indeed Trump proved his entire life. Why wouldn’t people resent it?

But Trump the huckster promised his aggrieved MAGA shock troops that rather than restore order he would make the rigged system work for Christian white nationalists. He is a crook and a liar, but he’d be their crook and liar. Trump alleged that the 2016 election was rigged even after he won it. He swears to this day that the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden was rigged. It was anger over that supposed rigging that fired up the mob he sent to sack the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Movement conservatism, the financial crisis, Russian disinformation and more have worked for decades to erode U.S. public confidence in the country’s basic functions to the point that MAGA Republicans are prepared to cast it all aside. The rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, the works. They don’t want to govern. They want to rule, immune and imperious.

What those of us not in Trump’s thrall and with a shred of faith left in America’s promise of equal justice under law was, in successful Trump prosecutions, the restoration of a rule of law that would apply to everyone.

“Donald Trump is a convicted felon. Let that sink in,” is the headline on Jeremy Stahl’s Slate commentary.

“We’re not out of this yet.” — Han Solo

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

The sickest thing you will read this week

My God:

DAYS AFTER DOZENS of Palestinians were killed by Israeli airstrikes against displacement camps in Southern Gaza, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley wrote “Finish them!” on Israeli artillery shells. 

Haley, who recently sputtered in her bid to defeat former President Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, toured a kibbutz ravaged by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack against Israel in the company of current Knesset member and former U.N. envoy Danny Danon. 

“If you think this will only be in Israel, if we are arrogant enough, this could absolutely happen in America too and this is the moral of this story,” Haley said at one point during the visit. 

Danon posted a collage of photos on Tuesday showing Haley writing on an artillery shell. “Finish them! This is what my friend, the former ambassador, Nikki Haley wrote today on a shell during a visit to an artillery post on the northern border,” Danon wrote. 

Alongside her chilling note, Haley wrote “America loves Israel!” and autographed the bomb. 

“Finish them”

That certainly has the echo of certain “final” kinds of “solutions” doesn’t it?

This is the person we are supposed to see as the “good Republican.” And she is a monster.

Woman in town from England goes down to the courthouse in lower Manhattan today to see the MAGA animals down there with her own eyes and is absolutely disgusted….no wonder America is a laughing stock because of these brain dead morons pic.twitter.com/5U0geFUfGw

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) May 30, 2024

They call her the c-word, not realizing that in England it’s the equivalent of calling someone a “dick” not the grotesque epithet it is here in the US. Nonetheless, those people are truly vile. Creepy.

And then there was this from earlier in the week:

This is an actual video that Trump posted to his Truth Social. It’s a vulgar attack on Joe Scarborough that proclaims Trump “will get rid of all the fucking liberals” if he wins.

Why is a presidential candidate posting that he will get rid of everyone who opposes him? pic.twitter.com/hHsGHvoxEB

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) May 28, 2024

He’ll get rid of all you fucking liberals. You liberals are gone when he fucking wins. You fucking blowjob liberals are done. Uncle Donnie’s gonna take this election—landslide. Landslide, you fucking half a blowjob. Landslide. Get the fuck out of here, you scumbag.

Trump posted something that says “you liberals are gone when he fucking wins.” I don’t know specifically what he means by that but it isn’t good. And anyway, it’s not like Trump hasn’t said the same thing in public:

We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

Recall that his spokesperson then responded to the ensuing criticism by saying:

Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump derangement syndrome, and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.

We used to call this eliminationism and it couldn’t be more black and white today.

As Greg Sargent pointed out:

The news here isn’t this one man’s anger at Scarborough, it’s that Trump elevated it. And moments like these require context: This one should be placed alongside Trump’s other recent threats, such as his vow that news organizations will be “thoroughly scrutinized” if he wins, his promise to persecute his “vermin”-like political foes, and his threat to prosecute a range of enemies without cause. Looked at this way, is it really a leap to suggest that Trump is broadcasting the idea that liberals should feel threatened en masse by a second Trump term?

There is a mini cottage industry of punditry that is forever on the lookout for the merest hint of disrespect toward conservative voters, particularly rural and working-class white ones. But the fact that the GOP nominee for president approvingly posted a video that declares a large ideological subgroup of Americans “done” and “gone” if he is elected—never mind the vile epithets directed at them—appears to have garnered almost no headlines. Few if any top-shelf pundits have scowled with disapproval.

This has long been the case, even before Trump came along. It’s fine for salt-of-the-earth to grossly denigrate liberals but make a passing comment about some conservatives being in a “basket of deplorables” and it’s off with your head. It’s griped me for my entire adult life but I’ve just come to accept that this will never change. It seems that our idea of “Real America” is so tied to the image common-sense, white yeoman farmers that right wingers are granted special dispensation to be assholes for some reason. The rest of us have to mind our manners.

But as Greg points out, this is now a serious problem:

This is not intended as whataboutism. Rather, the point is that allowing such moments to remain decontextualized makes it easier to evade grappling with their true underlying intent. After all, it is undeniable that a central rationale of Trump’s presidential run is the threat to use state power to persecute and target—in a newly aggressive way—a large, albeit ill-defined, class of Americans who are designated as enemies of Trump and his MAGA movement.

It’s not just talk anymore. If we didn’t know that before January 6th we certainly should now.

The difference between “Morning in America!” And “Everything Sucks!” is, apparently, the last .8% of cumulative price change. https://t.co/vONCxIeivf

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) May 30, 2024

Reagan won re-election in a landslide.

People get very upset when you suggest that maybe this immense amount of whining about other people’s economic problems (most people say their own finances are fine) might be a bit self-indulgent. Mea culpa.

I was wondering the other day about our more recent experience: the Great Recession. That was just 15 years ago and it was extremely painful and the recovery was much slower than this one has been. Looking at the index of consumer sentiment over the period of 2009-2012 when Obama was handily re-elected (if not in a landslide) the trajectory is about the same. It was in the doldrums until 2012, at which point it ticked up to exactly the level it is today.

Yet some people were so convinced that Obama was in deep trouble throughout that year that when it was clear he won on election night, Karl Rove even had a fit on the air, convinced that it was impossible that Obama had won:

Shortly after Fox News became one of the first to call Ohio for the president, Rove chastised its “decision desk.”

“This is premature,” Rove said, adding later that he’d be “very cautious about intruding in this process.”

As NPR’s David Folkenflik wrote earlier today, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly tried hard to convince Rove that the network’s analysts had found no plausible way for Romney to overcome his deficit.

David reports:

“Even as more results continued streaming in, Rove did it again. At 11:40 p.m., he was still at it — reciting county after county, “and then there are cats and dogs elsewhere that add up to another 120,000 votes.” Kelly and Baier sought to provide a check but listened sagely to Rove, who is not just a chief political analyst for Fox and a columnist for its sibling newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, but also a leader of one of the major outside political committees spending tens of millions to defeat Obama and other Democrats.

“Having lost the argument — not to mention his call that predicted for Romney an edge over Obama in the electoral college of about 30 electoral college votes — Rove made clear that the president’s victory carried little weight.

“‘He has blown the last two years — he’s played small ball,’ Rove said around 12:40 a.m. Wednesday. ‘This does not bode well for the future. … He may have won the battle but lost the war.'”

I’m not saying it’s the same situation. There’s so much about this election that’s unique. But it’s not unprecedented for a president to be re-elected with consumer sentiment just coming out of the doldrums as this one is. Let’s all take a deep breath.

One of the most popular and entertaining feeds on twitter is one called “NY Times Pitchbot” which has even been name checked by President Biden. It mocks the NY Times, obviously, usually for its “both sides” tendencies. But it’s getting harder and harder to mock them. Here’s Kevin Drum on one recent egregiously misleading headline:

This is one of the more cowardly headlines I’ve read in a while:

Emerging Portrait of Judge in Trump Documents Case: Prepared, Prickly and Slow

If you read the actual piece, it contains one (1) example of judge Aileen Cannon being prepared—set against half a dozen where she was confused or mistaken. But the main thing the story makes clear is that practically everything Cannon does is to Donald Trump’s benefit. The headline says nothing about this.

A more accurate hed would have been, “Inexperienced, Slow, and Always On Trump’s Side.” Why run the article at all if you’re going to bury it under an innocuous and misleading headline?

That’s just one example. I’ve highlighted quite a few in the last few weeks as well.

Most of the actual journalism at the Times remains as good as always. But something is very wrong in the headline department. And it’s not just there. The mainstream press in general seems to be hedging its bets in this way, probably to appeal to certain algorithms for clicks and eyeballs. Unfortunately, many people only read the headlines and they set a narrative that does not reflect the truth. It’s a problem.

I’ve been belatedly listening to the Rachel Maddow podcast “Ultra” which is about a far right, Nazi-sympathizing, authoritarian plot to overthrow the FDR administration during the late 30s and early 40s. I knew about the German Bund, of course, and I’ve written about the big Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. But I confess I was not aware of the massive investigation and trial to put Nazi spies and collaborators on trial. The echoes of today are overwhelming which is why Maddow dug into the story, I assume. (She never mentions it in the podcast, though, which is very effective.)

Being in that mindset, I guess it’s not surprising that I love the lede of this piece in The New Republic:

In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” read the cable, which was written five months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”

The article isn’t about that, however. It’s about a secret communications back channel among current American right wing players. There is documentary evidence and it’s chilling:

I’ve thought about that passage from the cable many times over the past several weeks as I’ve been reading excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December by Erik Prince, the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and younger brother of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Donald Trump’s administration, who invited around 650 of his contacts in the United States and around the world to join. Prince, who has a long track record of financing conservative candidates and causes and extensive ties to right-wing regimes around the world, named the group—which currently has around 400 members—“Off Leash,” the same name as the new podcast that he’d launched the month before.

Among the topics are the “Biden Regime” which they think is in an alliance with Islamic terrorists, hostility to democracy, hatred for Palestinians, Iran among other things, all of which are expressed in especially violent, nihilistic terms.

The author points out that while there are many conspiracy nuts (such as Lara Logan) there are also a lot of people who you might ordinarily consider to be establishment players:

All of which makes Off Leash arguably more concerning, because the group can’t be dismissed as merely a collection of harmless cranks. Many of the participants, though not all household names, are wealthy and politically wired—which makes their incessant whining in the group chat about being crushed under the bootheel of the deep state particularly grating—and they will collectively become wealthier and more influential if Trump wins the November election. That’s especially true of the Americans in the group, but the same holds for the international figures because the global right will become immensely more powerful and emboldened if the former president returns to the White House. That prospect is a source of great hope to Off Leash participants. “Trump, Orban, Milei, it’s happening,” former Blackwater executive John LaDelfa posted to the group during a trip to Argentina on December 4, two days after Prince created it. “Around the Globe, we are the sensible, the rational, the majority. Don’t give in to fear. We will defeat the Marxists.”

Collectively, Off Leash provides an informal virtual gathering place for current and former political officials, national security operatives, activists, journalists, soldiers of fortune, weapons brokers, black bag operators, grifters, convicted criminals, and other elements in the U.S. and global far right. The roster of invitees includes:

-Icons of the MAGA ecosphere such as Tucker Carlson, the most revered figure among group chat participants, with the exception of the Supreme Leader himself; Kimberly Guilfoyle, the longtime fiancée of Donald Trump Jr.; and retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s convicted-then-pardoned first national security adviser. Flynn has participated, Carlson only minimally, and Guilfoyle not at all.

-Current and former lawmakers and aides, such as Tennessee Congressman Mark Green of the House Freedom Caucus; Vish Burra, who was director of operations for Congressman George Santos; and Stuart Seldowitz, a national security adviser to Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011 who was arrested last November after harassing an Egyptian halal street cart vendor in New York City for two weeks, during which time he called him a “terrorist” and said, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough.”

These are not harmless cranks. They are “of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.” Many of them will be influential in a new Trump administration.

Read the whole thing if you can.

Trump’s campaign thinks he wins whether he’s found guilty or not:

Donald Trump’s pollsters have been tracking the impact of his indictments throughout his first trial and, moving to get ahead of events, are arguing that regardless of the verdict in the New York hush-money case, they can spin it in his favor.

In the campaign’s internal polling, two-thirds of respondents say politics played a role in his criminal indictments.That is at odds with public polling, which has found that somewhere between a plurality and a majority of Americans believe the case has been handled fairly, with a sharp partisan split. Some 60 percent of voters have said they think the charges are very or somewhat serious. Even 6 percent of Trump voters say they would be less likely to back him if convicted.

But the Trump campaign’s interpretation of its own polling suggests what its strategy might be for dealing with a guilty verdict. Trump’s advisers and allies say the public, which has largely tuned out the trial, may have already factored the possibility of a conviction into how it sees Trump. And as Trump has before, he’ll use the case to bolster the grievance narrative he’s been cultivating for years.

“We’ve got 66 percent telling us that politics have played a role in it. Only 28 say ‘no role,’” said Jim McLaughlin, a Trump pollster whose firm conducted the survey. “The interesting part about that is, even 27 percent of Democrats are saying ‘politics played a role in the indictments.’”

No politician wants to be convicted of a crime, and if he is convicted, it is not out of the question that Trump could face prison time. But if the jury cannot reach a verdict or finds Trump not guilty? “The media loves asking the question, ‘OK, what happens if Donald Trump is found guilty of a felony?’” McLaughlin said. “They don’t ask the question, ‘What happens if he’s found not guilty?’ If he’s found not guilty, I think he gets a bump out of it.”

I suspect he will get a bump if he’s acquitted too. It validates the idea that he’s teflon, an invincible superhero. I could see it convincing some people that he is unbeatable so might as well get onboard.

I wouldn’t take what Trump’s pollsters say about those numbers as gospel though. They have to lie or their patron will be very angry. I doubt any polling can capture how people will react to either verdict to be honest. If I had to guess, if he is convicted the reaction will fall along the predictable party lines with a few people at the margins saying they’ve have enough. And the opposite if he’s acquitted. But who knows?