Analysis reveals Trump’s game plan for a possible guilty verdict

30 May 2024

Late Wednesday morning, May 29 in a Lower Manhattan courthouse, jury deliberations got underway in former President Donald Trump's hush money/falsified business records trial.

It remains to be seen how much time the jury, which includes two attorneys, will spend deliberating the case and what they will ultimately decide. Trump is facing 34 criminal charges altogether, and there are a variety of possible scenarios for a verdict.

Politico's Adam Wren, in a report published on May 30, details the Trump campaign's game plan for a possible guilty verdict.

"In the campaign's internal polling," Wren reports, "two-thirds of respondents say politics played a role in his criminal indictments. That is at odds with public polling, which has found that somewhere between a plurality and a majority of Americans believe the case has been handled fairly, with a sharp partisan split. Some 60 percent of voters have said they think the charges are very or somewhat serious. Even 6 percent of Trump voters say they would be less likely to back him if convicted."

Wren continues, "But the Trump campaign's interpretation of its own polling suggests what its strategy might be for dealing with a guilty verdict. Trump's advisers and allies say the public, which has largely tuned out the trial, may have already factored the possibility of a conviction into how it sees Trump. And as Trump has before, he'll use the case to bolster the grievance narrative he's been cultivating for years."

The public polls that Wren cites were conducted by Quinnipiac University and PBS/NPR/Marist in May or YouGov in February.

Longtime Republican strategist Dave Carney stresses that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr.'s hush money/falsified business records indictment plays into the "victim" narrative that Trump has been using for years.

Carney told Politico, "I think most people think this jury will indict Trump or convict Trump, and they'll end up going to the appellate courts to resolve this. But I think it's made the president stronger. Since '15, he's been a victim, played the victim card — Russia, Russia, Russia, all this stuff. And now, in full high-D, 5G TV, he confirmed that."

A senior official for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign warns fellow Democrats that if Trump is found guilty on any of the charges, it won't be a panacea for the campaign.

The official, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Politico, "I don't think any of them should count on these convictions or indictments somehow moving the needle against Donald Trump. It doesn't seem so, so we've got to win on our own merits."

Read Politico's full report at this link.

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