This op-ed was published by The National on June 1, 2024

After decades of carefully skirting lawlessness in his business, political and “romantic” affairs, Donald Trump has finally been held to account by the US legal system. Mr. Trump was found guilty in the adult film star hush money case in Manhattan, making him the first former president to be an adjudicated felon. But the impact on the 2024 election is unclear.

Mr. Trump was condemned by a jury of his peers in the city that knows him best. He was strikingly convicted on all 34 counts after only two days of deliberations. It’s a decisive legal defeat, though each of his other three pending criminal cases – the purloined top-secret documents case in Florida, and the federal and Georgia state prosecutions over his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election – are far more serious both legally and politically.

It is still possible that the federal anti-democracy plot case could go to trial before the election, but the Supreme Court is dragging its feet on a simple and unnecessary ruling upholding a lower appellate court finding that, obviously, former presidents are not immune from criminal prosecutions.

Both the Trump campaign and that of his presumptive opponent, US President Joe Biden, issued statements agreeing that the historic conviction won’t have much impact on the campaign or the election. Both have vowed to continue as planned. But, although both sides are likely to indeed persist with their existing strategies, the guilty verdict in fact could have a huge impact on the outcome.

Mr. Trump’s team and supporters are breathlessly insisting the convictions actually help his chances in November. They point to a potential fundraising surge, just as occurred when he was indicted in Georgia. That could well happen, and one of his key fundraising websites crashed immediately after the verdict, possibly because, as the campaign claims, it was overwhelmed by small dollar donations from his base.

Yet this is almost certainly empty bluster. His core supporters won’t care that he is now a convicted felon, as well as an adjudicated sexual abuser, defamer, fraudster and tax cheat, as determined by other recent civil cases. And they would have the same reaction to convictions in any of the other cases. The same applies to the disgraceful response by most elected Republicans who have rallied to his defence and condemned the process as “entirely political” and utterly illegitimate. There is nothing, apparently, whatsoever, that would shake the dedication of his party to its dear leader.

But the fact that the core of the Republican Party has become something of a personality cult does not mean that the relatively small number of uncommitted voters in swing states share this bizarre blind allegiance. They may well find this conviction, and the despicable reaction of Trump and other leading Republicans in attacking the US judicial system to be the last straw.

Mr Biden is unpopular. And many Americans insist that the country is in an economic recession when, in fact, it is economically robust and they report that their own finances are doing well. Many also believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high rather than the actual 50-year low. Some of this is because of relatively high inflation and interest rates, meaning that the cost of borrowing and keeping money is high. But it is also the result of persistent and shameless propaganda by right wing media that have pushed narratives about crime and economic rates that have been highly misleading, to put it charitably.

But Mr Trump appears to be even more unpopular, and that will only be exacerbated by these criminal convictions. Mr Trump’s reaction, lashing out not merely at the prosecutors but at the jury, the judge and the legal system as a whole, is characterised by the kind of unpatriotic and, let’s face it, downright anti-American outbursts that won’t help him with the swing voters he must win over.

Because both men are distinctly unpopular and are effectively both incumbents running for second presidential terms, the election probably boils down to a simple formula. If it is a referendum on the president, as a re-election campaign normally would be, Mr Biden is likely to lose. But, if it is instead a referendum on Mr Trump, then it is the former president who has chance of prevailing. The criminal convictions as well as earlier devastating civil judgments only underscore that reality.

Mr Biden’s campaign will not only focus on making the case about his own presidency and plans for the next four years. It will goad and provoke Mr Trump, and sit back and watch him expertly make the case against himself. Age, his party’s seemingly endless adoration and the recent pseudo-monarchical trappings of the presidency have all combined to increase his arrogance, raging narcissism and shocking inability at self-control.

Unless Mr Trump’s rhetoric and personal behaviour suddenly moderate, his potential for creeping self-destruction as the campaign moves along is enormous. And his own fixation on himself, his endless grievances and his antipathy for all existing American institutions, now focused on the judicial system as a whole, may make it impossible for him to shift the focus onto Mr Biden.

The candidates have agreed to two debates, but it was always questionable whether Mr Trump would ultimately show up for them. That potential evasion is now even more plausible, since Mr Biden could and certainly should hammer on the point that only one of the two candidates on the stage is a convicted felon, as well as an adjudicated sexual abuser and fraudster.

Mr Trump still retains a huge amount of public support and has been leading by small margins in most polls of swing states. Polling data in the next few weeks, as the impact of the criminal convictions is measured, will be very significant.

But the campaigns are both right that this probably will not be determinative. Neither side has yet found a key breakthrough moment that creates decisive momentum and forms a winning coalition.

But the bottom line is that Mr Trump’s conviction cannot possibly be a positive for him in winning back the presidency. It is, at the very least, a serious blow. And while, on its own, it may not guarantee Mr Biden another term, it could well be a key part of an overall message about Mr Trump’s fitness for office that ultimately secures victory for the Democrat.

This op-ed was published by The National on April 10, 2024

U.S. President Joe Biden finds himself squeezed between competing imperatives in the run-up to the November presidential election.

Neither he nor his presumptive Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump, have yet assembled a working coalition that can produce an electoral college majority, delivering either candidate a second presidential term. Mr. Biden is in a far more advantageous position, but he faces a potent conundrum about how best to expand his current base: moving to the right and embracing former Trump voters or tacking to the left and trying to shore up the liberal coalition that secured him victory in 2020.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that Mr. Biden has little to lose by making a concerted push to win over alienated Republicans. But such a move could be very risky.

Traditional assumptions hold that Mr. Biden’s former voters are unlikely to end up supporting Mr. Trump, whose racist, violent and extreme rhetoric is far more radical now than in 2020 or 2016. The overwhelming majority, the thinking goes, will eventually come back to Mr. Biden – even holding their noses – or, at the very least, will stay home.

But how many will really be won over by the current, highly radicalized, version of Mr. Trump currently on offer? Apparently more than most Democrats would have anticipated.

Current polling suggests that Mr. Trump is doing much better among Latinos and non-college-educated African Americans and other minorities, once bastions of the Democratic voter base and core parts of Mr. Biden’s 2020 coalition, than many liberals would’ve thought possible.

Democrats have long suffered from an evident and lazy complacency, with the assumption that Latinos would be impelled by a mixture of immigration and economics, and African Americans by resentment of Republican racism and their own class concerns, to always return to their fold.

Many Latinos are socially conservative, religious Catholics or other Christians, and are therefore responsive to the traditionalist and even reactionary Republican agenda, especially on abortion. Immigration does not trump everything else, and Latinos are by no means united in wanting the US to be more welcoming at the border. Indeed, many working-class Latinos are as resentful of recent migrants using the asylum system to try to bypass formal immigration processes as other Americans.

Non-college-educated African-American men have proved to be particularly receptive to Mr. Trump’s appeals in recent months. The extent to which they are aware of his new rhetoric about immigrants from Asia and Africa “poisoning the bloodstream” of the US population, or if they would care, is unclear. But his populist message, designed to appeal rhetorically to blue-collar constituents outside of the traditional unions, does seem to resonate with many young black men.

Both groups also appear to be receptive to his hyper-nationalism and isolationist rhetoric, wrongly assuming, along with many of their white rural counterparts, that international engagement and leadership are simply a burden on the American people and a boondoggle for wealthy corporations. Finally, both seem responsive to Mr. Trump’s persona as a strongman outsider who can supposedly cut through traditional power structures and impose better and fairer policies on a corrupt and parasitical elite.

So, Mr. Biden needs to be attentive to the drift of these groups away from his constituency, which in some cases could mean tacking to the populist left in order to counteract the populist right.

Moreover, the Gaza war has cast a huge shadow over Mr. Biden’s credibility with progressive left-wing groups, many of them African-American social justice and religious constituencies, who are deeply angered about the carte blanche given to Israel in attacking not just Hamas but the whole of Gazan society. On the US left, there is a conviction that Israel has engaged in an exterminationist, even genocidal, war in Gaza with the strong backing of the President and his administration, and that this has been shameful and morally unacceptable.

Mr. Biden needs to distance himself from this war, and therefore needs an end to major fighting in Gaza before campaigning gets fully under way by the early summer. But there is little sign that Israel views the timeline in a similar manner. Pushback from the progressive left is a key reason that the administration has been slowly ratcheting up pressure on Israel to ease the humanitarian crisis and prepare to end the war in the coming weeks.

But if Mr. Biden attends to these groups, it could be at the expense of the most significant “gettable” group of voters, in addition to the suburban constituencies in swing states that are likely to determine the outcome. While Mr. Biden has his Democratic critics, Mr. Trump goes into the election with a striking number of Republicans who clearly don’t want him as their nominee. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley consistently got between 20-40 per cent of primary votes, and there is ample additional evidence that more Republicans than ever are fed up with his extremism and shenanigans.

Mr. Biden has already attempted to reach out to these voters by embracing what amounts to a Republican agenda on border security in legislation that was killed by Republican House members, precisely to thwart such outreach. But there is much more he can and should do to make it clear to disaffected conservatives, especially those who once supported Mr. Trump but no longer can, that he represents an acceptable, even desirable, alternative.

Mr. Trump’s upcoming legal tribulations, especially the trial on hush money payments to an adult film star that is due to start next week, could well offer the President a devastating weapon. A felony conviction could provide a decisive opening to convince former Trump voters and other Republicans to at least stay home in November.

Mr. Biden wouldn’t have to tack very hard to the right to win over many of them, but he’s going to have to do more than he already has. The problem is that if he reaches out to disaffected parts of his 2020 coalition among minorities and on the left, he may lose the opportunity to steal or silence decisive numbers of Republican votes.

Mr. Biden’s conundrum is that he quite possibly cannot have both or simply rely on one group or the other coming back to him in November in despair. He’s probably going to have to choose between these outreach agendas. And, given what’s at stake in the 2024 election, that’s going to be a momentous strategic decision indeed.