The Trump grand jury has sent the defeatists into overdrive

When the news first broke early on Tuesday evening that the Manhattan District Attorney was empaneling a special grand jury for the specific purpose of hearing indictments in the criminal case against Donald Trump, my first thought was “Here we go, finally.” My second thought was, “I wonder how the doomsday pundits are going to spin this to scare people into believing Trump is still going to get away with it all.”

Sure enough, the doomsday crowd didn’t disappoint. On MSNBC alone on Tuesday, we were told to fear the possibility that the grand jury may not actually be targeting Donald Trump. Of course this is a joke, given that there’s no way the District Attorney would empanel a special grand jury like this if the only people being targeted for indictment were underlings.

We were also cautioned that there’s no way to know whether the grand jury will agree to indict anyone, as if this were all some kind of unknowable 50-50 crapshoot. Nevermind that when prosecutors ask for indictments, the grand jury grants them greater than 99% of the time.

We also saw a brief rehash on MSNBC of the notion that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis could somehow magically keep Trump from being extradited to New York, even though 1) numerous legal experts have spelled out why no such concept even exists, and 2) Trump isn’t even in Florida anymore.

Then came the fearmongering suggestion that if Trump turns around and declares himself a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, it’ll somehow make it harder to convict him. While this might be true with qualitative criminal charges where the jury gets to define reasonable doubt, there’s a reason Trump is being targeted for the kinds of straightforward criminal charges where the proof is right there in the financial records, and conviction is automatic.

There was also an MSNBC panelist who suggested that Trump being indicted and arrested could somehow get him elected in 2024, which if nothing else served as unintentional comic relief.

None of this is to pick on MSNBC in particular. The doomsday pundits on Twitter also had a field day, with a few of them insisting that Trump might somehow merely end up paying a fine instead of going to prison. Nevermind that Trump is ostensibly being targeted for mortgage fraud, tax fraud, insurance fraud, wire fraud, campaign finance fraud, and money laundering, any one of which comes with an automatic prison sentence.

The point is this: there are a whole lot of pundits, on TV and online, whose business model relies on scaring you into continuing to pay attention to them. This new grand jury pokes major holes in their doomsday narratives about how Trump is going to get away with it all and come back to destroy us all in 2024. So of course the worst of the lot are going into overdrive to try to come up with new ways to scare you into believing that Trump will still somehow magically get away with it all.

Your job, more than ever, is to filter out this nonsense. We have a whole lot of important battles to fight and win, from enacting the liberal agenda, to the 2022 midterms, to whatever new monster the Republicans try to throw at us in 2024. We can’t afford to get discouraged and sidetracked by doomsday prophecies about how the ghost of Trump is hiding under our bed. But the doomsday pundits are going to keep trying.