What if the Manhattan D.A. has built a very strong case against Donald Trump?
What if he’s convicted?
(I hear grumblings from my readers… “It won’t matter, Trump gets away with everything”)
What if the former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker spills previously unknown beans about his little ol’ box of secrets? Which according to Ronan Farrow, he shredded before the feds could get their hands on them. “What was in those files, Mr. Pecker?”
(So what—we find out he had more affairs? That’s part of Trump’ brand—no one is going to care)
Joe Palazzolo, one of the Wall Street Journal reporters who first broke the story about Michael Cohen’s payments to Stormy Daniels says he’s looking forward to what Pecker will say on the stand:
I think that Pecker is really important because he can set the table…
He has never spoken about this. I mean, he’s obviously discussed it with law enforcement and lawyers, but his testimony about his various communications with Trump around these deals is going to be really interesting to me, because we have pieced it together over time and reported on it, but hearing it from him directly in a public setting — I’m hoping that it may reveal something that I didn’t know.
What if some of the new dirt does tarnish the brand—at least with enough Trump-tolerant voters who might now start to have new second thoughts?
You’re talking about the polls that show a conviction could cause as much as a 7-point shift from Trump to Biden? So what? I’ll believe the polls I want to believe.
What if
(subscribe to what’s at the top of my political bookmarks here) is right when he says,I don’t agree with the idea that Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York City is a yawner. Sure, it’s a trial about business records. But it will also be packed with drama, involving a former president having sex with a porn star just after his wife Melania gave birth to their son in 2006 and paying her hush money to hide it from the public.
There will be salacious details — many which we probably don’t know yet — that will fill cable news shows for weeks.
While a conviction seems unlikely to land Trump in jail, the trial could certainly hurt his current presidential candidacy.
What if that last line ends up being the understatement of the year?
What if well, yeah, going into the general election—maybe even the Republican convention—after being convicted in the NY case and also maybe the DC federal trial (see my not-so-tortured logic here), that could take a couple of points off his poll numbers, wouldn’t you think?
Well…
What if I’ve been right in this column to compare how we’re going to feel about a former president tried and convicted on multiple criminal counts to how we felt about international terrorism before 9/11. We didn’t have a clue what an attack like that would mean—forever after.
What if the cable news hosts and talking heads you are tuning out right now who periodically remind us that nothing like this has ever happened before are themselves normalizing this behavior?
What if it has the effect of turning this unparalleled moment into another cable news catchphrase, like Nicolle Wallace’s "the disgraced, twice-impeached, four-times indicted, ex-president?"
Something wrong with Nicolle Wallace now?
What if…no, not at all. I much prefer her to some of the other people I watch on her network, who increasingly prove the value of the common household mute button, but
What if that shrug of grim acceptance we’re all doing, and seeing on our TV screens, is a consequence of something that might be even more sinister than Donald Trump?
What if the cartoon character we have for a “disgraced, twice-impeached, four-times indicted, ex-president” is at least in part a result of the way we’ve downgraded, denigrated, mocked, abandoned and lost all hope in politics?
What if we’ve gone from “ask not what your country can do for you” to “what did you expect” from a system that’s so corrupt and removed from people’s lives?
The trial isn’t going to change any of that.
Maybe not. But what if the next few months of courtroom drama punctuated by Donald Trump’s daily acts of self-destruction and ending with a conviction deflates some of his puffed-up image?
We’ll believe it when we see it.
Yes. You will.