Anyone Who Still Chooses To Vote for Trump Has Only Themself To Blame*

The criminal case involving hush money paid to an adult film star is too contrived, too trivial and too old to prompt Donald Trump’s supporters to desert him en masse. Ultimately, it will not fall to the courts, but to voters, to decide the fate of the United States.

The verdict is of historic proportions. For the first time in U.S. history, a court has found a former president guilty of a criminal offense. Even so, Donald Trump’s chances of being elected president again on Nov. 5 remain intact.

He might end up forfeiting the votes of a handful of people who simply cannot countenance voting for a convicted felon. Yet, five out of six recent opinion polls put Trump in the lead in the very states set to decide the outcome of the election. Trump is garnering higher approval ratings for competence in managing the economy than the current president. Joe Biden is not only losing ground among Latino and African American voters, but particularly among younger Americans, owing to the war in Gaza.

Two impeachment processes, several court cases and myriad meltdowns have failed to damage Trump. The New York jury’s guilty verdict is unlikely to harm the habitual liar much either, for the following three reasons. First, the case is old hat. The matter of some $130,000 paid to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged sexual affair with Trump during the 2016 presidential election has long been public knowledge. Neither the payment nor the affair itself was illegal. Trump’s undoing was not to have recorded the amount as an election campaign expense, but instead to have buried it in legal fees paid to his lawyer, Michael Cohen, who made the payment to the porn star. The case is at once too contrived, too trivial and too old to prompt a mass exodus of Trump’s supporters.

Second, Republicans are still lining up in Trump’s defense. The party — that one-time respectable pillar of the country — should have broken ranks with him following the storming of the Capitol at the latest. They are not about to abandon him this time around, no matter what sentence Judge Juan Merchan hands down on July 11. The judge is highly unlikely to put the 77-year-old ex-president behind bars. Until now, Trump’s record was squeaky clean, and the crime in question is no capital offense.**

Third, he has a truly devoted supporter base. Even shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue would not cost him any votes, as Trump claimed in 2016. This frighteningly accurate observation continues to inform Trump’s unabashedly brazen behavior to this day. Immediately after the verdict’s announcement, Trump was aggressively casting himself as the victim of a “witch hunt,” and a “very innocent man” persecuted by the “deep state.” He has no qualms whatsoever about assailing the judicial system with his rambling, sanctimonious attacks. The authoritarian populist thrives on fomenting polarization, a problem this verdict will only serve to amplify.

Trump consciously factors in the weakening of democratic institutions as a necessary cost. It is indefensible that he did not concede defeat in the 2020 election, that he sought to obstruct the formal certification of Biden’s election in Congress and goaded his fanatical supporters to storm the Capitol. This is also the reason he has been indicted in connection with interfering with the 2020 presidential election. It is a far more consequential case than the Stormy Daniels hush money trial, and one that Trump’s lawyers have successfully kicked down the road. Trump will not have to face trial on these charges before November’s presidential election.

Biden is correct when he says the only way to keep Trump out of the White House is through the ballot box. In the end, it will not be the courts, but voters, who decide their country’s fate. Trump’s unfitness for the office of president has been clear for anyone willing to see it and to anyone who abides by certain principles, long before the New York jury delivered its verdict.

*Editor’s note: This article is available in its original language with a paid subscription.

**Editor’s note: The author is apparently referring to Trump’s criminal record. Trump has been found liable in a number of civil cases involving fraud and defamation.