After Trump conviction, Democrats are in a triumphal mood. They shouldn’t be

5 months ago 2

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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.

Sometimes for the sake of stability — or to avoid catastrophe — it’s best to leave well alone.

For all his faults, Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon understood this in 1960, ignoring his party’s clamor and declining to seek recounts in the states of Texas and Illinois amid credible allegations of election fraud and ballot stuffing.

“Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis,” he told his journalist friend Earl Mazo — despite the fact that if he had managed to overturn the results in those states, Nixon would have defeated his opponent, John F. Kennedy, by two votes in the Electoral College.

Fast forward to today, and it appeared that throughout the prosecution of former U.S. President Donald Trump — a history-making feat of high drama jurisprudence — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sometimes seemed reluctant. In the end, however, he chose not to follow his predecessor Cyrus Vance Jr. — or U.S. President Joe Biden’s Justice Department — in refraining from mounting a prosecution over hush-money payments made by the former president.

Of course, whether Bragg’s courtroom victory in securing Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal will pass muster in the appeal courts is another matter — there are plenty of reputable legal experts who suspect a Trump appeal will eventually be successful. Regardless, with two cases down and another three to go — federal cases in Florida and Washington, and an election-tampering case brought by a state prosecutor in Georgia — Democrats are in a triumphal mood.

But they shouldn’t be.

There are two reasons for this: First, it’s doubtful the conviction will have any lasting impact on Trump’s election prospects in November.

Take the Morning Consult poll, released a few hours after the conviction was handed down on Friday. According to the survey, just 15 percent of Republican voters nationwide now want Trump to drop his election bid. That matches the percentage of those who supported Trump’s final primary challenger Nikki Haley when she halted her campaign. So, essentially, no Republican minds seem to have been changed by the hush-money trial.

Moreover, when it comes to independent voters, 49 percent think Trump should halt his campaign due to the conviction. But that’s not really much of a change either, as prior to the case, independents were split pretty evenly between Biden and Trump.

Overall, in keeping with other pre-conviction polls, Morning Consult found the White House race to be roughly tied between the two candidates. Interestingly, it also found around half of voters would oppose the former president’s imprisonment, with the majority (69 percent) saying he should only be fined. This suggests most voters don’t think the felonies are that consequential, and that they don’t require much more than a slap on the wrist.

But none of this should should be surprising. Even before the case, a poll conducted by PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist had found that for every two out of three registered voters, a guilty verdict would have no bearing on how many would decide to vote come November — and that included independents. However, it had also found that if Trump were found guilty, it would deepen partisan divisions, with 25 percent of Republicans saying they’d be more likely to vote for him, and 27 percent of Democrats saying they’d be less likely to do so.

This leads to the second reason why Democrats shouldn’t be cheering, and that’s because the conviction will likely only accelerate the dizzying and ugly downward spiral in tit-for-tat partisan retaliation, including the use of courts and prosecutions, well-founded or otherwise, to settle political scores.

Even before the conviction, a reelected Trump was likely to be vengeful — he’s been happily advertising his intentions to hound his enemies and weaponize the federal government against them for months now. A study of the former president’s social media posts by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that since January of last year, Trump put out more than 13,000 messages on his Truth Social platform that were threatening revenge, retaliation and retribution against Biden, judges and critics.

Last August, he posted: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” And you better believe he means it — he isn’t a man who forgives or forgets.

Back in 2016, before Trump was elected, British businessman Richard Branson was taken aback by his first meeting with the soon-to-be president. He noted that even before the starters arrived, “he began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people.”

“I found it very bizarre. I told him I didn’t think it was the best way of spending his life. I said it was going to eat him up, and do more damage to him than them … What concerns me most, based upon my personal experiences with Donald Trump, is his vindictive streak, which could be so dangerous if he got into the White House,” Branson wrote. So, today, further recrimination and chaos likely beckons.

Part of the moral of the story is that if you’re going after Trump, you better be sure you’re going to nail him — a slighting wound isn’t enough. Does that mean he should be given a pass for wrongdoings, providing him with impunity? No. But better let the voters decide in November, or we’re heading for a never-ending cycle of revenge.

So, what will ultimately get the U.S. out of this torment? Republicans and Democrats seemingly see everything as a zero-sum game, the art of compromise eschewed — and Trump, of course, has taken this to an unmatched and horrifying level. No sooner is a president elected, there’s now talk of impeachment. Can’t win at the ballot box? Use the courts or whip up a crowd. Democrats are as guilty of all this as Republicans — admittedly deescalating is no easy thing when your opponent is Donald Trump.

Back in 1974, then-President Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon the disgraced Nixon prompted outrage, as critics argued it wasn’t good for America, creating a dual system of justice — one for ordinary Americans and another for the president. But Ford defended his decision, saying: “I was absolutely convinced then as I am now that if we had had [an] indictment, a trial, a conviction, and anything else that transpired after this, that the attention of the President, the Congress and the American people would have been diverted from the problems that we have to solve.”

Ford was a man who knew when it was best to leave well alone. We should take note.

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