By Steve BermanThe same people who vote for hacks like Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis (who easily won her Fulton County primary in a heavily Democratic county) in district attorney races rushed to get a “snap poll” of what America thinks about the conviction of Donald Trump in Manhattan.
The ABC/Ipsos poll shows…nothing really changed.
ABC, being part of the Democrat machine, chooses to see the part where half of Americans want Trump to get out of the race. But another half–mostly Republicans–say it’s just fine that Trump stay in. Also, 84% of Republicans think Trump should continue his campaign.
The guilty verdict didn’t change anything in terms of who sees Trump favorably, and who does not.
After a jury found, given the very tight constraints of the courtroom rules, and the giant “guilty” thumb on the scale by Judge Juan Merchan’s jury instructions, that Trump had his bookkeeper write something other than “hush money payments” on records dealing with crook Michael Cohen, fewer people think he intentionally did something illegal than a similar poll held a month ago. In April, 53 percent thought Trump did something illegal, and after the verdict, it went down to 51 percent.
What ABC didn’t really highlight is their own poll found that nearly half of Americans–Democrats and Republicans–think that the charges were politically motivated. Only 38 percent think they weren’t and 15 percent said they “don’t know.”
To me, what’s more interesting is what the poll didn’t ask.
For example, nobody was asked what the penalty for these convictions should be. It was 34 counts, one for each individual check or ledger entry. In most sane courtrooms, this would be consolidated into a single count, and a misdemeanor at that. But the statute of limitations on the misdemeanor charges of having false business records in 2016 has long passed.
So Bragg’s prosecutors concocted a witch’s brew of underlying felony charges to support a felony indictment, making the accounting records charge suddenly available again. This all started in 2018, when the feds charged Michael Cohen with a whole dugout full of tax evasion and lying-to-bank crimes that had nothing at all to do with Donald Trump. Cohen pled guilty, just as the feds tacked on two campaign finance charges, which were the ones used in Trump’s trial. At Cohen’s sentencing the feds strong-armed David Pecker (who owns the National Enquirer) to turn stoolie on Trump to avoid his own charges.
All of that sat gathering dust for six years, until–bang!–election year came. Then Bragg managed to turn it into 34 felony counts, and Judge Merchan–the same one who locked Trump’s octogenarian CFO away–told jurors to “pick a felony, any felony” in their deliberations. They weren’t even required to agree on which ones they used, as long as the verdict was “guilty.”
If that’s not politically motivated and filthy, dirty tricks lawfare, nothing is.
The country knows this. Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, this is either a case of “the ends justifies the means,” or it’s a railroad trial. Those who hate Trump don’t care what methods are used to take him out, as long as they can politically benefit from it.
So why should the polls change one iota of what people believe, when just about half the country publicly admits this was a political prosecution?
And what should the sentence be? We will find out in July. Whatever it is, I don’t expect Trump to abide by it, and I don’t expect it to be carried out before the election. In fact, there’s a decent chance the whole case could be thrown out on appeal, due to various factors, like not having a sequestered jury, or the weak legal ground used to put the charges together.
It doesn’t matter to those who only want to use the trial and the guilty verdict to get Trump out of the race. They knew it wouldn’t work from the beginning. Trump is not going away.
Now the focus shifts from Trump’s trial to Hunter Biden’s. Watch the media, including ABC, twist themselves 180 degrees so fast it will give you vertigo.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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