The fact that Donald Trump has been indicted four times means we all must use shorthand to differentiate between the cases. So one case is the \u201cclassified documents\u201d case. We\u2019ve got the twin federal and Georgia \u201celection subversion\u201d or \u201cJan. 6\u201d cases. Then there\u2019s the first case charged: the Manhattan \u201chush money\u201d case, which will also be the first to go to trial, next week, unless Trump succeeds in delaying it.<\/p>\n
But that last shorthand might not be totally apt, if a Monday letter from the judge in the case is any measure. Indeed, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan seems to indicate that what we really have is a third election interference case.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe allegations are in substance, that Donald Trump falsified business records to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election,\u201d Merchan summarizes in laying out the process for jury selection, which is set to begin Monday.<\/p>\n
Merchan isn\u2019t exactly rewriting the charges against Trump. But the characterization is a reminder that there\u2019s more at stake here than Trump\u2019s alleged affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels, hush money or even allegedly breaking the law by hiding the hush money paid to Daniels. (Those particulars are salacious but seemingly small-bore compared with Trump\u2019s other three indictments.)<\/p>\n
What we also have is an alleged plot to illegally obscure damaging information to benefit the winning candidate in a very close election. And given how close that election was, it\u2019s hardly ridiculous to wonder what effects this alleged crime may have had on the country\u2019s course.<\/p>\n
But could it possibly have swung the 2016 race?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s unknowable. But there are a couple of things we can say.<\/p>\n
One is that Trump\u2019s victory came by less than one percentage point in the decisive states. He won Michigan by 0.2 percent, Pennsylvania by 0.7 percent and Wisconsin by 0.8 percent: Change 78,000 votes in those states or shift the entire electorate just one point toward Hillary Clinton, and Trump is never president.<\/p>\n
The other is that Trump appears to have won because voters who were undecided late in the race broke strongly for him. Exit polls showed that those who made their voting decision in the final days broke for Trump by 11 points in Michigan, 17 points in Pennsylvania and 29 points in Wisconsin.<\/p>\n
And there were enough such voters in each state to make the difference, as I wrote back then:<\/p>\n
The question from there is whether a potential late disclosure of an alleged affair with a porn star may have had enough of an effect on enough voters \u2014 either those many wavering late deciders or any other voters. Again, we\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s tempting to say that it wouldn\u2019t have. Voters, after all, elected Trump despite learning a month before Election Day about the \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d tape in which Trump mused about sexually abusing women. Trump overcame any number of other controversies to get elected. And late deciders tend to break against the party that holds the White House, as Clinton\u2019s party did at the time.<\/p>\n
But just because Trump won doesn\u2019t mean he was Teflon. Punditry often devolves into treating every attack on a winner as a failure, because they won. But sometimes things do damage a winning candidate \u2014 just not enough to lose.<\/p>\n
As appears to have been the case with \u201cAccess Hollywood.\u201d A 2020 study from the University of Massachusetts and Brandeis University examined the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. It found that those who were exposed to the tape were two points less supportive of Trump.<\/p>\n
Brandeis\u2019s Jill S. Greenlee concluded that the 2.1-point \u201cpopular vote loss might have been narrower for Trump or maybe wouldn\u2019t have happened at all\u201d if not for the tape.<\/p>\n
To believe Trump would have suffered further from the Daniels allegation would involve a few things. One would be her actually lodging it publicly if she wasn\u2019t paid off. Then Trump would need to have lost voters who weren\u2019t sufficiently turned off by \u2014 or aware of \u2014 the \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d tape and his other controversies.<\/p>\n
Certainly, there\u2019s something to be said for a critical mass of controversies potentially serving as a breaking point for voters. Or perhaps some voters who accepted Trump\u2019s defense that the \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d tape was mere \u201clocker room talk\u201d may have been more concerned about a more substantial allegation about Trump\u2019s actual conduct. An affair with a porn star is the kind of thing that would seemingly be at least something of a problem for many of Trump\u2019s then-newfound evangelical Christian supporters.<\/p>\n
Of course, media coverage of alleged Trump affairs followed him for decades, so perhaps it was baked in to his brand by that point. And given the affair probably wouldn\u2019t have been and still hasn\u2019t been proven \u2014 Trump has always denied it, though he has lied about the situation \u2014 maybe voters would simply chalk it up to being unknowable. Perhaps they would even view it as a last-minute dirty trick from a disreputable character \u2014 an adult film actress.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s clear is that Trump and his then-lawyer Michael Cohen saw potential value in covering up the whole thing. And whether illegally or otherwise, they deprived us of this counterfactual. You can\u2019t rerun an election, so in that sense the plot may well have paid off.<\/p>\n
But as Trump faces legal accountability for it, it\u2019s probably worth recognizing that the \u201chush money\u201d and even the \u201cfalsifying business records\u201d shorthand doesn\u2019t really account for all that this alleged crime may have meant \u2014 for Trump or the country.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The fact that Donald Trump has been indicted four times means we all must use shorthand to differentiate between the cases. So one case is the \u201cclassified documents\u201d case. We\u2019ve got the twin federal and Georgia \u201celection subversion\u201d or \u201cJan. 6\u201d cases. Then there\u2019s the first case charged: the Manhattan \u201chush money\u201d case, which will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2951,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}