Voters Learning from Trump's Four Court Cases: Beyond the Legal to the Political Awakening—Well Maybe
American Eclectic posts articles twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. This is the second year of publication; previously published articles can be found on my site.
April 15, 2024
Back in 2019, then Representative Justin Amash (R. MI.) held a town meeting. One of his constituents who attended challenged him that the Mueller Report, which investigated the relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, had anything negative to say about Donald Trump. Amash had the ammunition in his hand and could quote from the report. After the meeting this woman said, “I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before." She added, “I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated.”
Amash represented Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District between 2011 and 2021. Amash was considered perhaps the most libertarian member of Congress and the first Republican to call for Trump’s impeachment. The same month that he held the town meeting addressed above, he stated that “few members of Congress have read” the Mueller Report. He further criticized then Attorney General William Barr, in a March 2019 letter to Congress. Barr wrote there were no grounds to pursue criminal action against Trump. As Barr wrote in his letter:
In cataloguing the President’s actions, many of which took place in public view, the report identifies no action that, in our judgment, constitutes obstructive conduct, had a nexus to a pending or contemplative proceeding, and were done with corrupt intent, each of which, under the Department’s principles, of federal prosecution guiding charging decisions, would need to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to establish an obstruction-of-justice offense.
Barr in his letter, however, did note the following about the Mueller Report findings, “this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
The Mueller Report addressed some of Trump’s actions stating:
Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations. The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.
Elsewhere the report stated:
[T]he investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. Those links included Russian offers of assistance to the Campaign. In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer, while in other instances the Campaign officials shied away. Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.
Well, a nice legal statement by the then Attorney General, which after reading it, admittedly, sounds about as legal as you can get, so requires some time to clearly digest what it said. I added some statements within the Mueller Report that pointed to something that, sort of, indicated that there was something there regarding Russian influence in the 2016 election and that the Russians clearly favored Trump over Hillary Clinton. Imagine if some report had even hinted that there was some type of Russian government activity that was associated with the Clinton campaign heading toward the 2016 election. Republicans would have run with it so the terms “Communist conspiracy” and “Communist subversion” might sound like we were back in the red scare days of the 1950s.
The issue is not to re-examine the Mueller Report but to realize that it seemed to say a lot and yet said nothing definitive and that leads me to wonder how the public might eventually learn, understand, comprehend, and assess Trump if he is on the ballot again in 2024. and if, by then, any or more than of the four court cases against him are underway. One trial has begun as this article is published. Certainly, the Mueller Report, is different than a trial where a conviction of Trump might happen. The ambiguity that readers might have gotten from the Mueller Report that pointed to Russian interference in the 2016 election supporting Trump, raises the issue of what voters clearly will get out of any of these approaching trials against Trump. Maybe, in some way, voters might be moved to think twice about whether to vote for Trump, but I am not sure. Data by The Economist/YouGov pointed to 31 percent of Americans saying they were paying some attention (I guess at a level of in one ear and out the other) to this year’s upcoming Presidential election, 18 percent very little, and 10 percent not at all—this at the end of February. To believe suddenly somewhere, maybe by June or July there is a significant shift toward more people paying attention to the election, does that mean they will take a close and careful look at Trump’s court cases? I doubt it.
The January 6th hearing in Congress pointed toward another situation where the public might have been influenced to look at Trump in a different way. One CNN article was titled, “The January 6 committee is about to show its work. Here’s what you need to know.” A PBS piece was titled, “What we learned from the first public hearing on the jan. 6 investigation.” OK, very nice, the titles of these pieces created the idea that the public was going to come away from the January 6th hearings and learn a great deal more than they thought they knew. From that new knowledge, was it assumed that a broad cross-section of the public was going to turn away from Trump. Learning something new you did not know before and then having it affect how you vote are two different things.
We know that Fox News covered the January 6th hearings as little as possible. We can assume that regarding anything about the four trials to come on Trump, they will probably cover those court cases in pretty much the same way. Those lesser conservative stations, News Max and OAN will probably do the same. I suspect organizations like Media Matters for America, will be issuing reports counting how many minutes Fox News devotes to Hunter Biden versus Trump’s time in court.
I was thinking of the Drudge Report and the impact it might have on some conservative voters based on how Drudge covers the Trump trials. One of the interesting things about the Drudge Report has been less the articles it posted and more the headlines it wrote about various articles. One article assessing the Drudge Report, tried to understand the relationship between financial headlines on this site and the movement of the S&P 500. This would seem to indicate that many people were attracted by the headlines and not much more. One journalist commented on Drudge headlines, “its headline on a link to a story in another paper is usually a good deal pithier than the original.” Although one headline caught Trump’s attention and required him to respond. The headline read, “Trump Denies Mini-Stroke Sent Him To The Hospital: Video: Dragging Right Leg.” Trump tweeted:
Drudge didn’t support me in 2016, and I hear he doesn’t support me now. Maybe that’s why he is doing poorly. His Fake News report on Mini-Strokes is incorrect. Possibly thinking about himself, or the other party’s “candidate”.
It will be interesting to see how Drudge approaches Trump’s trials and whether his headlines will have an impact on some voters—possibly more so than any news that might be on an evening’s cable news show. Drudge’s reach and influence has fallen, by one estimate as much as 45 percent in the last four years, but nevertheless he might influence enough voters to affect the 2024 election. Trump supporters may have stopped following his site, but they are never going to change how they look at Trump. In a close election, influencing a small group of voters may matter greatly. Whatever headlines Drudge posts might influence those readers who continue to follow him—many of them conservative voters who are not enamored by Trump. In other words, some conservatives may be starting to count Drudge out as no longer influential because of his declining audience, but I am not sure that matters if the part of the audience that left are the ones that would not be receptive to what he has to post. I do not believe that those conservatives continuing to follow Drudge would vote for Biden. I suspect they would vote for a lot of other people and issues that are on their ballots and simply not vote for President. The term undervote applies here: Just skip over voting for President. We might see this is as a form of quiet protest.
The issue of undervote, as a way of addressing the possible impact of Trump’s four court trials might matter in a significant way. One study noted that between 2012 and 2016, the election in which Trump was elected President, there was a sizable increase in undervotes—and that affected Republicans more than Democrats. As the study stated, “The primary explanation for this rise is an increase in abstentions, which we argue results primarily from disaffected Republican voters, rather than alienated Democratic voters.” A public opinion poll from June of last year showed that 49 percent of those polled believed Trump was guilty, the worry for Republicans was that 25 percent of the Republicans believed he was guilty. A follow-up poll in August found that while 52 percent of Republican primary voters supported Trump, if he is convicted (I assume in at least one of the four cases) his support among those same voters falls to 35 percent. I have to wonder how far his support would fall if he were to be convicted in all four cases. All this “bad taste in the mouth” feeling, might contribute to an increase in undervotes.
For eighteen years, while I taught at a university, I was a regular political commentator or political analyst (I cannot tell which of those descriptions is which, they run together) on two local television stations in the St. Louis area. I guess I did somewhere well over 1,100 appearances during that time, and I found it insightful regarding what people got out of seeing me on television. It was normal that usually the day after I was on, sometimes from being on different shows throughout the day, people recognized me and said “Hey, I saw you on television.” Inevitably I asked if they liked what I had to say and the usual reaction was, “I don’t remember much about what you said, but I liked your tie.” After about a year, I started to infrequently insert the word “crap” into whatever I was talking about—sort of an experiment. It was inevitable that when people recognized me, usually again the next day, they said they heard me say the word “crap” but had trouble remembering more than some generalities about what I spoke about.
What do people learn politically and from where and how? Do news pieces, TV news clips, segments of information from somewhere influence them to question how they see the world around them. I often wonder about this regarding the issue of climate change—how will a mass of people suddenly see it as transcending the often-superficial nonsense of, say, Tomi Lahren sounding off on climate change? I found a statement she made about herself, well, more than just odd—this from someone who reaches so many people you think she might feel a sense of responsibility to want to learn and understand basically anything regarding the world around her and maybe impart to her viewers/listeners/followers what she is learning that she did not know before. Unfortunately, that is too much to expect from Ms. Lahren. She stated:
I’m going to be honest with you, I’m not a reader. I don’t like to read long books. I like to read news. So I couldn’t tell you that there was a book that I read that changed my life. More so, I love to read news and I love to read commentary and I love to watch TV. I love to watch news. I’m a watcher and I’m a writer. A reader in the sense that I like to read news but I have a very short attention span, so sitting down with a book is very difficult for me.
Any assumption that Democrats might have that the actual start of the four Trump hearings can, in some ways, help Joe Biden in a big way in his re-election bid this year might be expecting too much—we cannot tell at this point, but I am not expecting some massive shift in voters away from Trump because of these court cases. I certainly expect that Republicans will do their best to make sure that Hunter Biden gets as much attention as Trump’s trials. We probably should expect viewers of Fox News, News Max, and OAN will get Hunter-Biden-all-news-all-the-time. If that is the case, will one cancel the other out so the voters, both Republicans and Democrats, will not be swayed significantly one way or the other. In 2016, Trump won over Hillary Clinton based on 107,000 votes cast in three states out of the 120 million total votes cast nationally. In 2020, Biden won over Trump by more than seven million votes nationally but 76,600 votes in four states (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, 43 Electoral College votes) made the difference.
We can expect that some voters will be influenced by Trump’s trials. The prospect of a former President being found guilty and that he might go to jail should outweigh any outcome regarding the son of a current President (certainly why the Republicans keep pushing the term “Biden crime family”), so that more attention should be on Trump. The problem is that these will be legal proceedings and precisely what will be learned that can lead to some voters deciding that, if Trump is on the ballot again, they will not vote for him, is difficult to determine.
Four different court cases, furthermore, creates a confusing picture of what matters and why. Legal and political analysts can say what is important and why, but that is not the same as a public determining what matters for themselves. Voters listening to legal analysts on television discussing one of Trump’s trials and then later listening to another one talk about another trial may lead to a public that simply tunes out much of anything about any or all four trials.
The New York Times did extensive writing on Trump and his taxes as well as how much he received from his father, Fred Trump. Trump stated, “I built what I built myself.” But the Times through extensive reporting showed that The Donald received at least $413 million from dear old Dad. One of the problems with the Times reporting was that it was so extensive and so technical that it took an effort to read and comprehend and if these articles were expected to somehow have an impact on the public and how they looked at Trump, that did not happen. There is, however, a wonderful quote in the Times on Trump and his father, “Fred Trump wove a safety net that rescued his son from one bad bet after another.” So much for Trump the savvy businessman.
Jordan Klepper does what can only be described as strange, but funny, interviews with Donald Trump supporters. In one segment in October 2023, he briefly talked with a Trump supporter wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Trump’s mugshot. Klepper asked the gentleman about the Trump picture with the words below the picture “Never Surrender.” The exchange went:
Klepper: What is Trump doing here on your shirt.
Trump Supporter: This is his mugshot.
Klepper: Gotcha. So that was taken when he surrendered to authorities to have his picture taken.
(Long pause)
Trump Supporter: Huh?
Will any or all of the court cases have an impact on some significant segment of the voters? Do not count on it.
Notes
William Barr, letter to House and Senate Judiciary Committees (March 24, 2019): https:// cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/Barr-letter.pdf
Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, and David Barstow, “11 Takeaways from The Times’s Investigation into Trump’s Wealth,” New York Times (Oct. 2, 2018): https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-wealth-fred-trump.html
Rupert Cornwell, “The Drudge Report: clever headlines, and eye for the new jugular,” Independent (February 29, 2008): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-drudge-report-clever-headlines-and-eye-for-the-news-jugular-789485.html
“Drudge Headlines Indicator Highs and Lows,” Bespoke (June 22, 2019): https:// www.bespokepremium.com/think-big-blog/b-i-g-tips-drudge-headline-indicator/
Drudge Report, “Trump Denies Mini-Stroke Sent Him To The Hospital, Video: Dragging Right Leg,” https://twitter.com/marklevinshow/status/1300893690421030912/photo/1
Keith Kelley, “Drudge Report traffic plunges as content turns against Trump,” New York Post (October 30, 2020): https:// nypost.com/2020/10/30/drudge-report-traffic-plunges-as-content-turns-against-trump/
Jordan Klepper’s Eye-Opening Return to the Trump Trail/Daily Show: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=jordan+klepper+latest&&mid=32EE9478F77B12F4DC5832EE9478F77B12F4DC58&&FORM=VRDGAR
Ankush Khardori, “A New Poll on the Trump Indictments has a Surprising Result,” Politico (July 6, 2023): https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/06/trump-trial-poll-ipsos-00104772
Paul LaBlanc, “The January 6 committee is about to show its work. Here’s what you need to know,” CNN (June 6, 2022): https:// edition.cnn.com/2022/06/06/politics/january-6-public-hearings-explainer/index.html
Amna Nawaz and Tommy Walters, “What we learned from the first public hearing on the jan 6 investigation,” PBS (June 10, 2022): https:// www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-we-learned-from-the-first-public-hearing-on-the-jan-6-investigation
Brad Reed, “Trump supporter admits she was ‘surprised’ to learn Mueller’s report didn’t actually exonerate the president,” RawStory (Ma 30, 2019): https:// www.rawstory.com/2019/05/trump-supporter-admits-she-was-surprised-to-learn-muellers-report-didnt-actually-exonerate-the-president/
Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I of II, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, Jr. (March 2019): https//www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download
Raymond Romano, “Poll: Trump could be in big trouble in 2024 if convicted of crimes,” yahoo!news (August 24, 2023): https://news.yahoo.com/poll-trump-could-be-in-big-trouble-for-2024-if-convicted-of-crimes-170551983.html
Charles Stewart, R. Michael Alvarez, Stephen Pettigrew, Cameron Wimpy, “Abstention, Protest, and Residual Votes in the 2016 Election,” Social Science Research Network (December 20, 2019): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3498612
The Economist/YouGov Poll (February 18-20, 2024): https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_g8XHtre.pdf
Jamie Weinstein, “Tomi Lahren on Conservatism, Her Support for trump and Her Influences,” Daily Caller (October 23, 2016): https:// dailycaller.com/2016/10/23/tomi-lahren-on-conservatism-her-support-for-trump-and-her-influences/