But what if it doesn’t happen?
IN THE MIDDLE of last year, several of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, including some of his 2024 campaign’s senior staff, started noticing an ominous trend in independent polling and in internal Republican survey data: A significant share of swing voters in key states — even some Republicans — say they would not want to vote for a freshly-convicted criminal.
The trend spooked them enough that, in recent months, some of these officials and political allies have directly warned Trump of possible looming catastrophe ahead for his 2024 presidential bid, two people with direct knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone.
For the most part, Trump has shrugged off such warnings, as he and his campaign brass publicly lean on bravado and their messaging that President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects are unequivocally doomed in November. Still, Trump and his legal team are working diligently to delay his criminal trials, in hopes that he can secure the presidency once again — and the power to quash the cases — before any potential convictions come down.
They’ve had at least some success: On Friday, the judge in Trump’s Washington, D.C. election subversion case declared that the trial will not take place on March 4, as it was originally scheduled, and will be rescheduled at a later date.
Republicans close to the former president and current 2024 GOP frontrunner have been carefully tracking poll results — especially in a handful of battleground states that will decide the expected Biden-Trump rematch — of likely swing voters who say they are open to pulling the lever for Trump, with a major caveat. Many of these survey respondents, including in the crucial bloc of self-identifying independents, keep saying that they would not vote for Trump, if prior to the election, a jury handed down a guilty verdict in one of the criminal cases against him.
In a number of national and state polls, this variable — whether Trump is criminally convicted — puts what has been a moderate Trump lead in peril. For several months, this trend has continued to appear in a variety of high-quality polls, both public and private, including as recently as this week.
But even as the MAGA elite publicly insist that Biden is historically vulnerable as an incumbent, the polling trend has grown increasingly difficult for Trump’s lieutenants to just brush off, according to interviews with seven knowledgeable sources such as conservative activists close to Trump 2024, officials working on the ex-president’s campaign, longtime GOP operatives, and Trump allies in right-wing media.
“[Late last year], I mentioned to him how the polls were saying a conviction would hammer him with some of the voters he needs to keep in his column to win,” says a source who has spoken to Trump about 2024 many times. “I said it was something to take very seriously, but not necessarily a death blow … But in my own thoughts, I kept thinking, ‘It’d be a fucking disaster.’ But we’ll find out, I guess. Hopefully, people are lying to the pollsters.”
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Within the upper echelons of Team Trump, there is a range of opinion on what these numbers mean exactly. Some say it’s too early and that it’s all theoretical, and therefore possibly a polling mirage. Others are concerned, but they’re not setting their hair on fire. Some are privately saying that a criminal conviction could be fatal to Trump’s chances at reconquering the White House.
Another close Trump ally tells Rolling Stone that, though there are many variables and Biden’s own polling is uniquely terrible, they can’t shake the feeling that one day they’ll look back on this polling trend as a bright-red warning sign — one that is comparable to the foreboding signs that Trump’s 2016 opponent saw for months before her defeat.
As this Trump ally points out, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign was derailed in part by an investigation by former FBI Director James Comey. The ally notes that Clinton “had [FBI director James] Comey hanging over her for the 2016 campaign. It was not the only thing that brought her down, but it was a significant thing… hacking at her campaign for months. Is a criminal conviction going to be our Hillary-Comey moment, if there ends up being [a guilty verdict] before the election? It’s a question that sort of haunts me, and I’ve discussed it with some of President Trump’s campaign people and people who the [former] president listens to.”
His cult doesn’t care, of course. They think he’s Jesus. And Trump himself doesn’t really worry about this having a negative effect on his electoral chances, I suspect because he plans on trying to unleash massive civic unrest if it happens. Whether that would do him any good remains to be seen but we saw on January 6th that he’s convinced violence is not only acceptable, it’s preferable to accepting defeat.
They go on to quote one of his big Evangelical backers who says that he will only get more popular if he’s convicted. They really do see him as the second coming.
The big question here is whether or not he will have a conviction under his belt before the election. The way it’s going , it doesn’t look all that promising. Jude Tanya Chutkan just postponed the January 6th case beyond March because the District Court is dragging its feet on the immunity case. (Needless to say, if they and the Supremes find that presidents have immunity for anything they do while president, even after they are out of office, we will have bigger problems — we will have a democracy in name only.) These delays could very well put them out of reach before the election and we know what he’ll do if he wins. And if the media would pound this the way they did Hillary Clinton’s penny ante email scandal, it would help.
And I have to wonder what will happen even if one or more of these important cases goes to tria and he’s found not guilty or there’s a mistrial? It’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Look at Kyle Rittenhouse, who went to a protest, loaded for bear, and then killed two unarmed protesters and got away with it. It could happen. And then all bets are off.
