Donald Trump is at that drunk friend stage of his downfall
The comedian Larry Miller once had a punchline about a drunk friend who yelled “We’re going to Florida!” and then promptly passed out. That line keeps popping into my head these days each time I see not only Donald Trump trying to assert that he’s going to run for President while standing four criminal trials, but also the media trying to assert that Trump is somehow going to be able to do this.
There are just so many ways in which this can’t possibly work out for Trump. There’s the practical matter of a guy trying to campaign when he’s potentially going to be on criminal trial in one jurisdiction or another for the majority of 2024. There are likely to be more weekdays in 2024 when he’s on trial than not on trial. What’s he going to do, campaign on the weekends? He’s going to put in seven day weeks? This guy can barely get out there and do the minimum of “campaigning” as it is. He’s supposed to be able to pull this off while also spending most of his weekdays in court, watching these trials send him to prison?
This is all before getting to what these trials are going to do to Trump’s viability. The media (on both sides) is still cherry picking numbers out of context so they can continue to run headlines claiming that Trump’s indictments haven’t impacted his Republican primary viability one bit. But in context, we’re seeing polls that say roughly half of Republican voters don’t plan to vote for Trump in the 2024 general election if he’s convicted of at least one felony by then.
In other words, outside of Trump’s base – which the math says comprises no more than about 30% of the overall Republican primary voting base – everyone else is just waiting to see. Half of Republican voters are saying that they plan to use Trump’s trials as a litmus test for whether to vote for him. That’s a real problem for Trump, because the litmus test that voters in his own party are identifying is that he only needs to be convicted on any one out of the 91 felony counts he’s facing.
Then of course there’s the cold hard reality that if he’s convicted on any one of these charges, he’s going to prison. These days the media loves nothing more than debating whether Trump should go to prison if he’s convicted, as if it were somehow optional. But in the real world there’s no mechanism under the law that would allow Trump to just magically not go to prison if he’s convicted. He’s not going to magically be sentenced to probation, or whatever nonsense the media is kicking around on any given week, just because he’s Donald Trump. The law and the criminal justice system simply don’t work that way.
But we keep being subjected to more and more of this breathless hyperbole about how a completely destroyed Donald Trump is somehow going to be a viable candidate in the 2024 election, simply because he keeps insisting he’s going to be one. Sure, just that like that drunk friend is really going to be able to drive to Florida before passing out, simply because he announced that he was going to.
