Indicting Trump Won't Get the Democrats What They Want
Bragg is playing right into Donald Trump's hands
Trump has done many things that Democrats and the media would absolutely love him to be indicted for. Inciting and attempting what they call a “coup” on January 6, colluding with Russia, or hoarding classified documents high among them. And yet what do they get? An indictment over hush-money payments and alleged campaign violations.
Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump is so convoluted that even The Washington Post has to admit that he is on thin legal ice. There have been numerous articles pointing out the flaws in Bragg’s case and the extreme difficulty in establishing Trump’s intent, as is required to secure a conviction. This is saying nothing about Bragg’s tortured rationale in inflating the charges from misdemeanors to felonies or his desperate argument that the statute of limitations “paused” while Trump lived out of state.
Bragg’s prosecution of Trump, even if it lead to a conviction, would not operate as any sort of bar to his Presidential campaign. Democrats are therefore banking that the specter of his indictment and prosecution will be enough to dissuade centrist, intendent, or undecided voters from casting their votes for a candidate under the cloud of criminal charges. This is an extreme miscalculation.
In 2016 and 2020 voters were well aware of the baggage that Trump had saddled himself with. His past was well-known and he never tried to hide his brash, crass, take-no-prisoners attitude when he held rallies or spoke in public while President. From the Access Hollywood tape to the past allegations of improper sexual conduct or lewd comments, the public knew the type of man that Donald Trump was. He won in 2016 because he was an outsider and his imperfections were seen as proof that he wasn’t “just another politician” who “said what he meant” and could therefore “drain the swamp.” But it was many of these same qualities that had, by 2020, become tiresome and helped to spell his eventual defeat to a candidate as weak as Joe Biden.
Trump’s predilections with Stormy Daniels were public record in 2020 and I know of no major voting bloc that saw those predilections and decided that they were the last straw and thus switched their vote from Trump to Biden. And if sex with a porn star didn’t move the needle, I doubt that overcharging Donald Trump for a campaign finance violation in relation to those same actions will result in any sort of sea change in attitudes toward him from the perspective of those whose minds aren’t already made up. Especially with a case as convoluted as the one Alvin Bragg is about to bring.
In 2016 and before, many in the media and in Democratic circles believed that Donald Trump was the ideal candidate for Hillary Clinton to face in the general election. He was loud, brash, had a problematic past, and had never held any political office. It was just those specific qualities, however, that made him explosively popular amongst conservative and even independent/undecided voters. They wanted someone who acted different than any other politician, sounded different, and offered tough and uncompromising resistance to the “swamp” that Washington D.C. had become. Hillary Clinton was the foil to Trump’s “outsider” candidacy and to the shock of so many on the left, she failed in 2016 and paved the way for Trump’s Presidency.
I think that 2016 opened the eyes of so many establishment Democrats that all of the prior strategies for defeating opponent politicians were useless against the grassroots popularity of Donald Trump amongst his conservative followers. In that respect, Trump’s “outsider” nature presented them with a unique problem that they had no way to solve using any conventional methods.
That left the Democrats no choice but to engage in extraordinary methods to oust Trump from the Presidency, or ruin him in the eyes of the voting public. Whether it be Mueller’s investigation into Russian “meddling” in 2016, two failed impeachment attempts, or the January 6th Committee, the American public have been constantly told that Trump is tantamount to an iron-fisted dictator that represents the greatest threat to democracy that this country has seen in our lifetimes.
I don’t mean to argue that what Trump has done did not warrant investigation, or that his hands remain spotless in all that has transpired. The point is that the media and the Democrats have built Trump up to be guilty of high crimes against this country but have produced no actual convictions. And so when Alvin Bragg brings such a shoddy and speculative case, it makes it easy for average Americans to understand Trump’s point that the charges against him have been politically manufactured to find some way, any way, to “get him” because all previous efforts to do so (on crimes of actual weight and import) have failed.
To the extent that any indictment or prosecution is a gift to a political candidate, Bragg is serving Trump with a whopper on a silver platter. It gives Trump a worldwide platform, through national media outlets, to speak to millions of people and make his case that Democrats are trying to turn him into a political prisoner, and to warn them that his prosecution is just the beginning, that soon the same thing could be happening to them based solely on their political beliefs. It was a song and dance that Trump practically wore out on a daily basis since 2016 and frankly, people were tired of hearing of by 2020. But now, that song sounds different because Bragg has made it real: a real indictment, real prosecution, the potential of real jail time for a former President. Bragg has, to an extent, proven Trump’s point for him, and for the benefit of all of his die-hard supporters.
Even a trial has its benefits for Donald Trump. Bragg’s primary witness is Michael Cohen, who went to jail for handling the payments to Daniels. Cohen also went to jail for lying to a Senate committee, tax fraud, and bank fraud. This is the man who Bragg is pinning his hope on to convince a jury that Donald Trump knew of these campaign finance violations. How Michael Cohen can be believed by anyone in order to establish another individual’s state of mind is highly questionable at best, and a legal impossibility at worst. It would likely take an entire week just to go through all of Cohen’s motivations to lie in order to see Trump go down. This yet again plays right into Trump’s hands that Democrats will use any means, even putting convicted liars and criminals on the stand, to see the end of his political career.
Most experts seem to agree that securing a conviction based upon the case that Bragg currently has will be very difficult, if not impossible. And that might be the worst outcome of all. Bragg’s prosecution will likely reveal absolutely nothing that the American people did not know. We knew that Trump had relations with Stormy Daniels, we know that he paid to keep that information quiet. Media outlets have harped on how Trump failed to disclose his tax returns, engaged in shoddy business practices, cheated partners and companies who performed work for him. And the result? People shrugged their shoulders and either voted for him anyways, or didn’t find the information all that moving and voted for someone else. The exact same thing will be true here, except that Trump will now have an even larger platform to make the case that he is the real victim here, and the flimsiness of Bragg’s case will ensure that there is a real chance that average American voters (not just Trump sycophants) will believe him.
Bragg has opened Pandora’s box, and that sound we all hear may be Trump laughing his way into the White House in 2024.