This is what winning looks like
Yesterday Donald Trump was indicted on federal criminal charges for trying to overthrow the 2020 election. His case was assigned to a federal judge in Washington DC with a stellar reputation who likes to work quickly. And six co-conspirators were listed in the indictment, meaning they’re all about to get indicted alongside Trump unless they swiftly flip on him. It’s all snowballing pretty quickly now.
There are still no magic wands, for either side. Trump is not going to be able to magically delay this trial until after the 2024 election. That’s just not a thing, no matter how many times that notion is referenced on TV or Twitter. On the other hand, Jack Smith was never going to be able to instantly remove Trump from the 2024 ballot just by bringing certain charges that magically trigger the 14th Amendment. That’s not a thing either, no matter how much it’s hyped on social media. Even if such charges are brought, it would result in years of court battles interpreting how the 14th Amendment applies to the case.
Instead, what we’re seeing play out is what we were always going to see play out: the systematic, methodical, piece by piece dismantling and destruction of Donald Trump’s life, freedom, and political viability. As things stand, only about half of Republican 2024 primary voters say they’re planning to vote for Trump. It completely disproves the narrative that his base is the Republican base, and that he’s somehow got the whole thing locked up.
In fact it proves that Trump’s base is merely some fraction of the 50% of Republican primary voters who currently say they’re voting for Trump. So what is Trump’s base? One third of the Republican 2024 primary voting base? The rest of the people currently picking Trump in primary polling are merely doing so out of pragmatism. And when Trump goes on trial for these 1/6 charges toward the end of 2023, and is convicted, and is sentenced to prison, his non-base supporters will obviously decide that they’d rather not have a nominee who’s in prison during the general election.
Even if the timing works out such that Trump does somehow manage to limp into the Republican nomination while being tried and convicted and imprisoned, he would obviously lose the general election in the biggest blowout of all time. As a statement of extremely obvious fact, people who are on the fence aren’t going to vote for an incarcerated candidate. And Trump can’t come within a million miles of winning a general election with his base alone. This is a basic mathematical fact that remains true no matter how much fearmongering about Trump’s omnipotent base you hear on TV or Twitter. They’re simply not a large group and never have been.
Besides – and this is another obvious thing that has to be stated because of all the ratings driven fearmongering you’re going to keep hearing – a guy who’s going to prison for the rest of his life has far, far, far bigger problems to worry about than his political future. His odds of winning in 2024 are going to be zero. He’s going to rot in a cell and eventually die of old age in a cell.
It gets even worse for Trump when you factor in this past weekend’s reporting that the 2024 PAC he’s been using to pay his legal bills is now broke. For all that obsessive talk about Trump’s supposedly die hard base who will “continue supporting him no matter what,” it turns out they’re not really donating to his 2024 campaign. But that’s what happens when even your would-be supporters know that you’re only pretending to run for office so you can raise money and use it to pay your legal bills. Trump’s base is clearly too worn out to fund his magic rescue fantasy.
The ratings driven fearmongering will now get dialed up to eleven, because there’s really nothing else the media can try to scare you with other than the notion that his trials will magically get pushed past the election and he’ll magically win. They told us we needed to stare at our screens in fear because Trump would never be indicted to begin with. Then they told us we needed to stare at our screens in fear because Jack Smith’s first indictment would be made to magically disappear by the judge. But now there’s really nothing left for them to fearmonger with, so now they’ll resort to the cartoon silliness of Trump somehow winning the election from prison or something.
But back in the real world, Donald Trump’s life – at least as he knows it – is over. He’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison. He now has two federal criminal trials and two state criminal trials forthcoming. All he has to do is be convicted on any one felony charge in any one of those trials, and he’s prison bound. If Republican primary voters want to forfeit the 2024 election by nominating a prisoner out of spite, that’ll be up to them.
As far as our next moves, while it’s important and cathartic to watch Donald Trump being brought to justice, he is not the biggest threat we’re facing. As I’ve been saying for two and a half years, he’s out to pasture. We’re facing actual ongoing threats. We have a maniacal Republican House that would be doing far more damage if its majority weren’t so narrow. We have a fully illegitimate Supreme Court. The only way any of this can be fixed is through, frankly, winning.
That’s why our focus for the next fifteen months needs to be on winning. Not fretting, not sitting around staring at our screens in paralyzed fear, not looking for things to angrily rant about. None of that. It’s about winning. We have to win in 2024 in order to be able to fix anything. We’re in really good shape to win the presidency, given Biden’s strong incumbency and the Trump implosion. But we’re going to need to put in the work to win the House majority. And we’re going to have to navigate a slightly tricky but entirely doable 2024 map in order to keep the Senate majority. Even as Trump focuses on all that he’s losing, let’s make sure our focus is on winning.
