Donald Trump Was Found Guilty, and Not a Single Mind Has Been Changed

I am not exactly breaking news here. Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of... business fraud? Paying off a porn star? Having an affair? We're still not quite sure. Even some legal experts are dumbfounded. There's a claim of fraud, but the only person who seems to have been defrauded was Trump when his lawyer, Michael Cohen, stole tens of thousands of dollars from one of his businesses.

Donald Trump had a scumbag for a lawyer and had an affair with a porn star. Congratulations, you convicted Donald Trump of being everything we knew he was personally - a privileged rich guy with poor judgment. Those are a dime a dozen in New York, much less across the rest of the country. But Trump's real crime was beating Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the Democrats will never let that go. Since he won the GOP nomination in 2016, they have tried to put him in prison. Now, eight years later, they got him.

Will it impact anything? Hard to tell. Nothing new was really learned from all this, except that you can now buy Trump prison merchandise from both sides of the aisle.

I don't want to be too flippant, it's just exhausting.

We've seen the poll numbers on whether a conviction will impact how people vote. It's basically a wash. The most recent polling shows nearly an equal number of people are more likely to vote for Trump or Biden based on a conviction, while two-thirds of American voters' decision remains unchanged.

If you are more likely to vote for Trump despite the outcome, you were probably going to vote for Trump anyway. If you were more likely to vote for Biden because of the conviction, you were already highly likely to vote for him anyway.

However, the polling on the conviction having an impact was hypothetical up until 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, May 30, 2024. Once that verdict came in, all those polls were largely meaningless. The question is no longer "Will it change your mind?" It's now "Did it change your mind?" But I don't think the underlying numbers change all that much.

I do not think there are many undecided voters at this point. I think there are a lot of people who are going to wash their hands of this foolishness and stay home. I think Trump supporters are more motivated to donate and go out and vote, and I think Biden supporters are more motivated to scream about the polls being wrong when Trump gets a bump from this.

The poll numbers may not change, but the level of voter motivation will change. Particularly on the Republican side.

Someone whom I adore asked me "Why is MAGA going to MAGA even harder?" after seeing some of the reactions on Facebook. "Do they not care that he was convicted?" That person is not alone in their sentiments, and a lot of people who are in the middle (or don't pay much attention to these things) are confused by the renewed intensity Trump supporters feel. It's not just Trump supporters at this point, though. There are a lot of Republicans who were holding their nose to vote for Trump who now won't be. They see lawfare, politically-motivated "justice," and they don't care for it.

I live in Louisiana. We had a governor's race between a crook and a Klansman, and the slogan "vote for the crook, it's important" won. A lot of Americans will be making a similar argument this presidential election. Sure, he was found guilty of these crimes, but the country sure ran better under him.

The economy, inflation, the border, crime... all these things are going to weigh more heavily on voters' minds. And that's why he's currently leading in the polls.