What exactly is the problem?

Looking back on the 2024 election, I stumbled on a prediction I made back in April that turned out to be less than 100% accurate, in the sense that it was completely wrong:

OK, here’s where my all-time favorite pop singer enters the picture, bringing with her a big bowl of hopeium:

Yet despite the potential for the Republican nominee to face jail time, only one in four voters said they were yet paying very close attention to the former president’s legal travails.

It’s utterly absurd, but the fact remains that, if Trump is convicted after the trial that starts on Monday, his chances of getting elected are going to decline radically — so radically that a normal political party would make a serious effort to replace him on the ballot. The GOP is now a cult, so that isn’t going to happen, but that’s how bad a conviction would be for Trump’s chances.

Why? Because the crucial 5% to 10% of the potential electorate that is genuinely undecided about whether to vote for Trump or Biden, or to vote at all, is the Ariana Grande vote, and the Ariana Grande vote is made up of the kind of people who would find Trump’s conviction on criminal charges to be both a shocking (because they’ve paid no attention at all) and extremely negative thing (because they’ve paid no attention at all). Keep in mind that the “this is just the political persecution of our Lord and Savior by the deep state” types are already baked into Trump’s support. Indeed that’s the core of his support, and a conviction isn’t going to change their behavior, except maybe making them a bit more violent than they would be otherwise.

But for the “swing voters?” A conviction would be utterly devastating for Trump. Conversely, an acquittal would be nearly as bad for Biden, but I honestly think the chances of that are slim to none. (The odds of a hung jury are unfortunately quite high, and it’s hard to say how that would play with the moron vote).

Let’s review for a moment shall we exactly what crimes Donald Trump was convicted of committing by a jury of his peers:

Trump illegally covered up the financial fraud he pulled off with his crooked lawyer, to further cover up the fact that he had unprotected sex with a porn star immediately after his wife had given birth to his youngest son. He committed these crimes in order to maximize his chances of winning a presidential election that he couldn’t have won if this criminal coverup of the coverup of his wildly sleazy adultery had become known to the public immediately before the election, which it almost did.

Now in the wake of the conviction there were a lot of reactionary centrist and Even the Liberal types who tut-tutted about the whole prosecution, since supposedly the behavior Trump engaged in was just “technically” a crime, that really wasn’t that serious because, um, something something. Larry Tribe brings some clarity here:

1. The criminal trial that begins April 15 has a theme almost nobody has yet fully appreciated. It’s the through line of illegally manipulating elections by distorting the information on the basis of which those elections are decided.

2. Now, for instance, with his nonstop efforts to delay the trial’s opening, Trump is doubling down on that strategy by trying to keep voters from seeing, before they cast their ballots in November 2024, how a jury of twelve ordinary citizens would evaluate the Manhattan DA’s charge that Trump tried, on the eve of the 2016 election, to keep the voters from learning that the Access Hollywood Tape was just the tiny tip of a sordid iceberg, one he feared would melt down all over his then teetering presidential campaign with the facts about his sex affair with Stormy Daniels, an affair that seems trivial in hindsight but that loomed large at the time in that cliffhanger-close election.

3. Think about it: Using the legal system — or, more accurately, abusing it — to cover up, in order to win in 2024, how he covered up the truth in order to win in 2016! 

4. That double-layered coverup, if successful, would more than make a mockery of our constitutional system. It would shred it, all the more so because the one thing Trump hasn’t even tried to cover up is his dictatorial plan to wield unlimited power over us all.

I mean you can’t really have much more serious criming that doesn’t involve rape/murder (it’s just a shot away). Committing financial fraud to cover up your depraved personal behavior in order to steal a presidential election is, like, not a technical crime. It’s a horrendous abuse of the legal system in order to illicitly seize the presidency of the United States!

So naturally I thought, if a jury unanimously agrees that Donald Trump did that, then the swing voters, the low information voters, the we don’t know how many senators each state gets voters, the people — and there were tens of millions of them! — who as of the winter of 2024 didn’t even realize that Donald Trump was going to be the Republican candidate for president, well, shirley those people were going to break hard for Joe Biden (or whoever) when it came right down to it.

I understood, of course, that 30% or 35% or even 40% of the American electorate is well past praying for. These are the I can shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and they’ll vote for me voters. Believe me, I get it. But what about my Ariana Grande voters? That’s, like, 15% of the electorate, at least? The people who weren’t even aware that Trump was going on trial, let alone for what exactly? How the hell did a jury convicting Trump for doing the crimes described above have NO APPARENT EFFECT on them?!? Trump ended up getting a significantly larger percentage of the vote than he got in both 2016 and 2020!

Now at this point I’ve got to wonder, with due apologies to Murc, whether the Democrats botched this. Would it have helped to run a million ads just flat out saying in the most explicit terms that a jury found that Donald Trump committed criminal fraud to cover up the fact that he had unprotected sex with a porn star right after his wife had a baby, to get people to still vote for him in 2016? This is a sincere question. Because how is that the kind of thing that our precious special snowflake “low information” aka morons swing voters still don’t care about? How?

Or are we truly in the age of LOL nothing matters? These are not rhetorical questions.