Now what?
Donald Trump has been found guilty on thirty-four charges and is now a convicted felon. We waited a very long time for this moment. Now that it’s arrived, and we’ve gotten what we’ve long wanted, it leads to a new question: now what?
There’s a temptation right now to be passive, to be a spectator, to sit back and watch what happens. Trump has a sentencing hearing in five weeks, and he might well be given a prison sentence. Trump’s appeal in Georgia is moving forward this week, which means his Fulton County criminal trial might happen before the election. And at any point the Supreme Court could announce a ruling that paves the way for Trump’s Washington DC federal criminal trial to be put back in motion. Meanwhile Trump is out there making one senile public appearance after another, even as initial polling suggests that his felony conviction has indeed hurt him with persuadable voters outside his base.
But here’s the thing about everything I’ve listed above: none of it’s under our control. There’s nothing we can do about Trump’s upcoming sentencing hearing. We can tweet all we want, but Judge Merchan is going to do what he’s going to do. There’s nothing we can do to alter the timelines for Trump’s other trials. Raging about the Supreme Court and Aileen Cannon feels good, and helps push them out front as villains, but it’s not going to change how the calendar works. The remainder of Trump’s trials will either happen before the election or they won’t.
As I’ve long said, Trump’s downfall isn’t going to come as the result of some instant trap door. His criminal trials were always going to chip away at him, and even deal him bodyblows. But even if he becomes so senile he’s wandering around without any pants on, and even if he’s in prison, the Republicans can still make Trump their nominee at their convention this summer. As I’ve said all along, the clown can run for President if he wants to make a fool of himself, and the Republicans can nominate him if they want to make that mistake. That’ll be their call, not ours. It’s yet another thing that we don’t have any control over.
So again there’s that temptation, when you realize just how much you can’t control, to just sit back and treat all of this like it’s a movie you’re watching in the theater. But I beg you not to. Because there’s a lot we can control. In fact there’s a lot we must control.
Presidential general elections tend to be close and fluky no matter how large the disparity between the two candidates and their relative prospects. In 1996 the presidential election was considered a huge blowout because Bill Clinton won by eight points. Eight points. And that’s a blowout. Joe Biden won by four and a half points in 2020, and if he’d only won by three points he might not have been the winner. Hillary Clinton won by two points in 2016, and we all know how that went.
Presidential elections are always closer than you think they’re going to be, and the Electoral College is always a wildcard sitting there waiting to screw with close elections. So when I point out that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump is a fully senile convicted felon who’s on a path to prison, I’m not saying this election is going to be non-competitive. I’m saying we’d better get out there and make sure it’s non-competitive.
Even if Trump’s health problems are as bad as they appear and he keels over before the convention, the Republicans will still have a nominee in 2024, and it’ll still be someone awful. And unlike Trump, his replacement wouldn’t be a senile convicted felon.
The bottom line is that there’s no scenario where we get to sit back and watch this election like spectators. Democracy doesn’t work that way. If you’re tired of having to do this every four years, just think of it as the price you choose to pay for getting to live in a free society. And if you’re tired of it having to be you who goes out and does the work every four years, instead of the next guy, that’s because you’re better than the next guy. You’re the ones who care.
This all brings us back to the question I asked in the title of this article: now what? And I think you already know the answer. It’s the same thing we did to win in 2020. It worked then, and it’ll work again. We just need more of us (that means you, the person reading this) to do it this time.
It’s the same tried and true formula that puts any election over the top. If you have money, make small dollar donations in smart ways. If you have free time, sign up to volunteer. If you have neither time nor money to spare, use your social media account to share donation and volunteer links, so that your followers with time or money will put it to correct use.
You can donate directly to the Biden 2024 campaign. You can donate to the DNC, DCCC, or DSCC and let them spread it around to Democratic candidates accordingly. Or you can donate directly to the Democratic House and Senate candidates running in the crucial toss up districts, which has the dual benefit of impacting the congressional majority while also driving up Biden’s vote total (anyone who goes out to vote for the Democrat in their local House race is likely to vote for Biden while they’re there).
But do something. It was okay to spend Trump’s criminal trial taking it in as a spectator. After years of fighting this monster, we all earned that. But the verdict was a gift to us, and now we have to go out and put that gift to good use. Persuadable voters think it’s absurd that Trump is still a candidate even though he’s a convicted felon. Now let’s go donate, volunteer, phone bank, and/or retweet the Democrats in order to help drive home the point to persuadable voters that there’s an obvious choice to be made. What’s next? We are.
