... Smith has pulled together a vast array of evidence on an extraordinary series of events with a reasonably simple theme: Trump’s self-conscious lies about what happened in that election.Kilgore thinks Smith's focus on Trump's dishonesty can change the course of our politics:
Trump lied about the outcome; lied about a host of made-up fraud claims; lied about the authorized agents for certifying the results; lied about the identity of legitimate electors; lied about the vice-president’s powers in counting electoral votes; and, worst of all, lied to the crowd on January 6 that subsequently stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of the election of his successor to the presidency.
... to a depressing extent, [Trump's] lies about 2020 remain credible to a broad swath of Americans.... But Smith’s prosecution of Trump in pursuance of this indictment will force a reckoning in great detail with the fundamental character trait that underlies all the other forms of his misconduct....But a majority of Americans already know he's a liar -- and some people who think he's a liar support him anyway.
The meta-theme of Smith’s indictment might be described as “Trump lied; democracy nearly died.” If nothing else, the former president’s power to bamboozle people could suffer a major blow as the facts of this case roll out.
During his presidency, the polling on this was clear. In YouGov's polling, 49.1% of respondents said Trump was "not honest and trustworthy" when he first took office; the percentage topped 50% the following month and never went below that. His highest "honest and trustworthy" percentage was 37.2%.
In an April 2020 survey from USA Today/Suffolk, 31% of respondents said Trump was honest and trustworthy, while 64% said he wasn't. In June 2020, Pew reported that only 36% of respondents thought the word "honest" applied to Trump "very" or "somehat" well. Gallup's numbers for Trump in October 2020 were 40% honest and trustworthy, 52% not honest and trustworthy.
Yet Trump won nearly 47% of the vote in the 2020 election.
We're seeing this again. In a March 2023 Quinnipiac poll, only 29% of respondents said Trump is honest; 65% said he isn't -- yet Trump trailed Joe Biden in that poll by only 2 points, 48%-46%. Biden's lead over Trump in Quinnipiac polling is now 5 points, but Trump is at 44%. Quinnipiac hasn't asked about honesty since March, but it seems unlikely that the percentage of voters who see Trump as an honest man is significantly higher than March's 29%.
So we shouldn't assume that the only people who vote for Trump are MAGA zealots who regard his every utterance as gospel truth. If these people were his only voters, he'd never win an election, or come close. But some people who know he's a liar vote for him anyway.
Maybe a trial, a conviction, or multiple trials and convictions will change that. But this case might not see a courtroom before November 2024. ("The median time for a criminal felony case to be finished in the U.S. District Court in Washington is nearly 18 months," writes Michael Conway, a former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee. "That statistic includes cases in which the defendant pleads guilty." The election is in 15 months.) We need to find other ways to beat Trump.
No comments:
Post a Comment