We’re finally seeing the big picture in Donald Trump’s downfall
Donald Trump has now been criminally indicted in four different jurisdictions. We still fully expect superseding indictments against Trump from Jack Smith, and there is still a chance that states like Michigan and Arizona will end up indicting Trump. But at this point we now have the core roster of criminal charges that Trump will go on trial for between now and the next election. In other words, we’re finally getting the big picture.
That big picture is going to consist of four criminal trials, each of which will easily take place well before the 2024 election, some of them sooner than others. There will be a lot of hand wringing from pundits on TV and Twitter who want us to believe that Trump is somehow going to magically get away with it all because he has too many trials, as if they’re going to cancel each other out or something. But that kind of talk is “look at me” performance art, not reality.
Federal and state prosecutors routinely bring separate charges against the same defendant. They know how to schedule their trials accordingly. They do this stuff for a living. So do the judges involved. If two of Trump’s trials threaten to overlap and interfere with each other, one of them will simply be rescheduled for a few weeks later, or something along those lines.
This isn’t one of those movies where the more incompetent the main character is, and the more trouble he gets into, the more he becomes able to overcome it all. The reason fictional tales written that way are so compelling is because they’re so far removed from how things work in the real world. Those kinds of movies are escapism. In the real world, the more trouble you’re in, the less likely you are to survive it all. The more something weakens you, the weaker you become. The more the deck is stacked against you, the more likely you are to lose, not win.
And that’s what’s going to happen to Donald Trump. He’s going to be put on criminal trial four different times on a combined hundred or so felony charges. If any one of those trial juries decides to convict Trump on any one of those felonies, Trump will be sentenced to prison.
Yes, prison. These are serious criminal charges, and the judges and prosecutors involved have already made clear that they don’t give a damn that the defendant used to be President, or would like to run for President again. There is no such thing as a scenario where Trump is convicted on crimes like RICO or the Espionage Act, and then somehow magically gets sentenced to probation or house arrest or an ankle monitor. That would never, ever, ever, happen. There is simply no legal basis for it. “I would like to be able to go out and campaign” is not a legal basis for getting your prison sentence magically converted into something other than prison.
So yes, Trump is going to prison. Once he’s convicted and sentenced he’ll do everything he can to try to delay entering prison. But as we keep seeing with Trump’s recent court filings, which haven’t managed to delay any of his trial dates by even so much as a day, Trump doesn’t have the ability to delay these kinds of things to his liking. Trump will either spend the general election in prison, or with multiple prison sentences hanging around his neck. If Republican primary voters are stupid enough to nominate him anyway, he will lose the general election in humiliating fashion.
We’ve already seen polling that says roughly half of Republican 2024 general election voters will refuse to vote for Trump if he’s been convicted of at least one felony by then. At this point Trump is nearly a 100% lock to be convicted of at least one felony by then. And while polling can incrementally shift and such, if anything remotely close to half of would-be Republican voters stayed home in November 2024 because they didn’t feel like doing something as pointlessly stupid as voting for a prisoner, then Trump is already completely washed up.
So where does this leave us? Donald Trump is going to prison. Republican primary voters will simply have to decide whether they want to nominate him on his way to prison, in what would essentially be a forfeit of the 2024 election, or if they want to nominate some outsider who opportunistically jumps into the race right around the time everyone figures out Trump is going to prison.
Our job will be twofold. First, we have to remain vigilant about the possibility that Republican primary voters might indeed make the pragmatic decision to nominate some dark horse public figure who slips into the race, unvetted, and heads into the general election with way too easy of a free pass from the media.
Second, we need to remember that while the Trump debacle will make the Republican Party’s life very difficult in 2024 no matter how it plays out, the House and Senate won’t win themselves. It’s very realistic for the Democrats to win the House and keep the Senate, but only if we win those vital “toss up” races that statisticians tell us are likely to come down to a couple of points one way or the other. Palmer Report will keep periodically publishing the lists of House and Senate toss up races, so you’ll know where to focus your donations and social media efforts, and it’s going to be crucial that you do your part with those races.
When it comes to Donald Trump himself, dare I say it, just enjoy the show. He’s now at a point where he’s threatening to hold a Four Seasons Total Landscaping type press conference next week, in the hope of proving to the American people that he secretly won the 2020 election. If Trump thought he had any path for winning or delaying his trials, or any way to avoid being sent to prison, he wouldn’t be resorting to this kind of thing. Not only is it all over for him, he knows it’s all over for him.
So let Donald Trump self destruct if he wants. On Monday he publicly tried to intimidate a grand jury witness, and it didn’t intimidate the witness at all. Trump still ended up indicted by the end of the day, and now he’s probably also going to get indicted for witness tampering. At this point Trump’s antics can’t help him. They can only hurt him. So if Trump wants to help the criminal justice system take him down even faster, so be it.
In the meantime, we continue to have work to do as political activists. As I’ve been trying to spell out for quite awhile now, Donald Trump is not the biggest threat we’re facing. Trump himself is finished. His life is over. But the Republicans and right wingers will always trot out the next set of horrible monsters, the next set of racist lies, the next round of bigoted paranoia, aimed at getting people in the middle to unwittingly lean to the right. Our job is to spend every day fighting back against that. Not fretting over Trump, not fretting over any one individual person, but actively fighting back against the entirety of the right wing propaganda machine. It’s why we do what we do. In the end, we managed to destroy Trump. Now let’s keep putting in the work and keep winning these battles.
