Was Trump Benefiting From Being Out of the News?If Cohn is right, then Trump will inevitably be hurt by his first criminal trial, because it will lead to a great deal of media coverage portraying Trump in a bad light, regardless of the outcome. Right?
Donald J. Trump appears to be a stronger candidate than he was four years ago, polling suggests, and not just because a notable number of voters look back on his presidency as a time of relative peace and prosperity.
It’s also because his political liabilities, like his penchant to offend and his legal woes, don’t dominate the news the way they once did.
In the last New York Times/Siena College poll, only 38 percent of voters said they’d been offended by Mr. Trump “recently,” even as more than 70 percent said they had been offended by him at some point....
Similarly, many voters seem to be tuning out his myriad legal challenges. A majority of voters said they thought he had committed federal crimes, but only 27 percent of registered voters in the last Times/Siena poll said they were paying “a lot of attention” to the news about the legal cases against him....
It seems plausible that the lack of attention paid to Mr. Trump contributed to his early strength in the polling....
The Times/Siena poll offers some evidence to support this idea. Mr. Biden has a 95-3 lead among Biden 2020 voters who say they’ve been offended recently by Mr. Trump, while Mr. Trump wins 19 percent of those who say they’ve been offended by him before, but not recently.
Similarly, Mr. Biden leads, 93-5, among Biden ’20 voters paying attention to Mr. Trump’s legal problems, while he gets 78 percent among those who aren’t paying very close attention or less.
I'm not sure that's a safe assumption. Trump survived his civil trials with strong poll numbers, largely because those trials were rarely the top story in America, or even the top story locally here in New York. A past and possible future president of the United States was charged with rape, defamation, and financial chicanery, and the media mostly yawned.
The media might get bored with his criminal trial as well -- already I can see it slipping from its prominent spot on news organizations' front pages, in favor of Israel's attack on Iran and probably, soon, the new Taylor Swift album. But maybe Trump will keep our eyes focused on him, even if it's to his detriment. He's already showing signs of being an insolent defendant:
It's likely that insolence will hurt Trump's chances for an acquittal, but he can't not do this -- his father drilled into him the notion that the worst possible sin for a man is to be "weak," and he's still trying to please Dad, who's been dead for decades. There's a real possibility that Trump will be even more insolent and obnoxious than he was in his civil trials.
On some level, you can't blame him. This is what impresses his biggest fans. Apart from the fact that the system is clearly afraid to punish him, even when he's clearly violating direct orders from judges, there's the fact that Trump has probably rallied the entire GOP to himself by being a defiant asshole whining about persecution.
But if his antics are worse than before, he might alienate general-election voters who haven't thought about how much of an asshole he is in the past couple of years. Maybe, instead of being a quiet, polite defendant, he'll hurt his poll numbers with obnoxiousness, just because he's desperate to impress Dad.
On the other hand, the press might decide that Trump's behavior is just dog-bites-man and barely cover it. That's more or less what happened in the civil trials. Trump was quite obnoxious and did things that would have led to jail time for most other people, yet it was never as big a story as, say, university professors testifying in Congress about anti-Israel protests. But if we're lucky, his endless quest to be the toughest guy in the room will be his downfall.
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