How Much Stress Can Trump Take Before He Implodes?
The last favorability polling on Matt Gaetz and Moscow Marge that I’ve seen was last year and had him at 21% favorable (in Florida) and her at 11% favorable (nationally). Both are gambling that the increased profiles they’re getting by disrupting the House GOP— even if most of the coverage, not counting on Russian state television, is highly negative— will somehow make them more popular, at least in their own backward red districts. Marjorie Traitor Greene’s Georgia district has an R+45 partisan lean and Gaetz’s is R+38. So the strategy could work. Although they are probably the two most detested characters in the Republican conference— by other Republicans.
I can’t imagine what Trump thinks about them and their antics, but I keep hearing that “Mar-a-Lago” is finished with them both, especially Marge. The chaos, dysfunction and appearance nihilism isn’t doing anything for the GOP brand and that can’t be good for Trump, not with with the suburban voters he has to win over.
And, no doubt, Trump is obsessing right now over the NBC polling released yesterday that shows RFK, Jr taking significantly more voters away from him than from Biden. Mark Murray reported that “The latest national NBC News poll shows the third-party vote— and especially independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.— cutting deeper into Trump’s support than Biden’s…” In fact, when pollsters just pit Trump against Biden, Trump leads by 2 points. When RFK, Jr, Cornel West and Jill Stein are thrown into the mix, it’s Biden who’s up by 2!
The reason is easy to see. “15% of respondents who picked Trump the first time pick Kennedy in the five-way ballot, compared with 7% of those who initially picked Biden. Also, Republican voters view Kennedy much more favorably (40% positive, 15% negative) than Democratic voters do (16% positive, 53% negative).”
And then there’s the “felon factor.” What happens if Trump is convicted at one or more of his trials before November? Stephen Saltzburg, a George Washington University law professor and a mediator for the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit told reporter Julia Mueller that “If he happens to be convicted on 34 counts, that takes its toll even on someone like Donald Trump, who seems to be that Teflon candidate. He’s the only person in America who could probably be charged in four different cases and have his popularity among his base go up, because the base is already convinced that he’s affected, that he’s being targeted… If he emerges from the trial a convicted felon … I don’t think that that’s going to play well with the independent voters, even though they may not be a huge population. People will hesitate, I think, before they vote for a convicted felon.”
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll found an increasing share of independent voters think the hush money case involves a “serious crime.” Fifty-one percent of all voters in the poll said Trump should not be allowed to serve again if convicted in that case, a figure that included 16 percent of Republicans.
A poll released earlier this year from Bloomberg and Morning Consult also found that 53 percent of voters in key swing states would refuse to vote for Trump if he were convicted of a crime, and that number ticked up to 55 percent if he were sentenced to prison.
…It may be some time before the Manhattan jury makes a decision. The trial is expected to last several weeks, and there’s room for legal complications and delays along the way. It’s also a dice roll on how long the jury deliberates— and in the case of a conviction, the judge would have to decide on sentencing.
…Prison time is a sentencing possibility if the jury decides to convict, though experts suggest it would be an unlikely sentence for the judge to go for in this case. If it happens, it still wouldn’t bar Trump from running in 2024, but it would further hamper his efforts to get back to the White House.
“It is certainly true that being convicted or even being in prison doesn’t prevent you from running for president or even from being elected,” said Ilya Somin, professor of law at George Mason University and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. “Assuming the office, though, would be a difficult situation if the president were in prison.”
Largely, experts are predicting the hush money case wraps up before Election Day, and some say it’s not out of the question that another one of Trump’s criminal indictments moves toward a jury before November.
The charges Trump faces are also noteworthy in that they’re “all in some way tied to his behavior as a politician,” noted Will Thomas, a business law professor at the University of Michigan, with the hush money case dating back to his 2016 run and the classified documents case reaching into his time post-Oval Office.
“It’s almost hard to step back and realize just how unprecedented these circumstances are,” Thomas said. “We’ve never had a president indicted before, sitting or former. Now, we have a president who’s facing not one but four criminal indictments, and we have the prospect of him being convicted in maybe one and possibly two before he actually has a chance to take office, if he were elected.”
There’s another factor that Trump probably doesn't understand and likely couldn’t care less about but that is certainly disturbing serious Republican leaders looking towards a post-Trump GOP. "The UAW’s historic win in Chattanooga shows the power of the sort of multi-racial coalition of workers that has terrified Southern aristocracy for centuries… ‘I think it’s going to start a chain reaction,’ Shawn Fain, the UAW’s president said Friday. ‘Once we show the world that it is possible, I think it’s going to open the door for thousands of other workers, tens of thousands of other workers to join in and to get justice on the job.’ Fain has quickly become one of the most dynamic labor leaders in American history. And we haven’t had one of those in a while. He and the UAW are seizing on an economy enjoying near full employment along with public investment in manufacturing at levels America hasn’t seen in more than half a century. And Republicans are terrified. Before the vote on Friday, GOP governors from six Southern states blasted the UAW for being against ‘the values we live by.’ This appeal to ‘trdaition’ in the South is barely coded. It speaks to the ‘racial bribe’ that helped make slavery work and provided the lifeblood of Jim Crow. ‘Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privilege to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves,’ as The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander explained. This bribe purposely divided Black and white workers, creating perpetual friction where an alliance would have served both. That bribe persists today in the divide we see between red states and blue states. Red states purposely offer fewer services, worse health care and generally poorer schools but what you get in exchange is that bribe that keeps the wedge alive. You may not get expanded Medicaid and that may close dozens of rural hospitals but we’re going to terrorize trans kids for you. We’ll make it harder for Black people to vote. You can count on us to make sure anyone capable of giving birth lives in a general terror.”
