A somewhat reassuring first snapshot of reaction to indictment no. 3, from CBS/YouGov.
That's not exactly a majority accepting Trump's criminal intent—it's well inside the MOE of 2.9 points—but more a reflection of the partisan division, with Independents split down the middle.
Those who decided the election was stolen by Democrats also decided it should be legal for Trump to steal it back because fair is fair and they don't have a very clear sense of what "rule of law" means. That's the somewhat reassuring part, that those people, the ones who probably can't be moved to reason, amount to just under 30% of the electorate, just about the same as the standard crazification factor—the other 20% constitute
a group, about a fifth of the country, who aren't entirely taking party lines in either direction, who do think Mr. Biden won legitimately, and also that Trump didn't act illegally. Some voice concern the charges are political, but four in 10 of them say that if Trump did try to overturn the election, it would be undermining democracy.
CBS goes on to characterize these as the interesting ones to watch, because you don't know how they'll react to a trial, but it strikes me that this particular response, refusing to say anything bad about Biden or Trump, corroborates something important about "swing" voters or "centrists", that they suffer from a kind of compulsive inability to take sides, and the way they break is probably essentially random. With that, the addendum, that almost half of them are able to imagine taking sides in this case, is probably a good sign. But it's a better sign that the polarized part of the response at this point is divided between close to half for the reality-based community and under a third for the create-our-own-reality group.
***
Something interesting Charlie Sykes (I know, ew) is asking on the radio: Is Trump actually trying to get himself jailed? Does he have a purpose in insulting prosecutor and judge and an entire city and displaying his racism and getting himself sanctioned? Is he volunteering for martyrdom? Does he think it will be good for his poll numbers?
I have to say there's something I don't fully understand about the whole story, and particularly the connection between his rude and crude "Truth" messages and the protection order he's expected to be subjected to today, which will warn him not to disclose any evidence he receives in the discovery package from the prosecution. What's the relationship between his threatening people online and that material? News stories aren't making it clear. Is it that he's finding out who the witnesses are and might post "Truths" outing them? Exposing them to death threats and the like? And thus intimidating them and hoping to get them to change their testimony? Attorneys please advise.
Anyway, I had another thought about why he might welcome martyrdom, a psychological one, keyed to his Trumpiness: that if he was convinced he was really caught for real this time, with no hope of escape, it might be most important to him to deny that he's lost control. He doesn't at all mind being seen as a criminal, he brags about it in his not-very-explicit way, but a criminal who's caught is an unsuccessful criminal. Is he trying to tell us getting convicted ("I'm doing it for you!") is his choice? Or that he's going to go down fighting, with his boots on, against the inexorable machinations of the Deep State? That his defeat won't be surrender?
He's always pretty meek in court, I believe, he's not defiant there. And I don't expect he'd change that, as long as they keep the ban on TV cameras, anyway. But is that the image he's cultivating, from his own territory online and on TV? In spite of the consequences it's bound to have, or because of them, to show he's still the captain of his soul?
Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.
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