Don’t Call it the "Hush Money Trial"
Donald Trump Cheated in the 2016 Election. Pass it on.
As I’m sure you now know, Donald Trump has been convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 criminal counts–and is now a felon. The party that has long fought to disenfranchise felons is planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get the country to vote for a felon as their Presidential nominee.
I have noticed that the press and many commentators have a tendency to call this the “hush money trial.” But those of us who desperately want to see Trump lose in November should talk about it differently.
Yes, the trial involved hush money. Many of the people in charge political strategy or things like writing headlines came of age when paying a porn star hush money to cover up an affair might have hurt a candidate angling for votes from the religious right.
But that ship has obviously sailed.
Trump’s remaining voters on the religious right know who he is and have made their deal with the devil. Stop trying to convince them by talking about Stormy Daniels. They don’t care.
We Don’t Talk About Stormy
More important, the problem with calling it the “hush money trial” is abortion.
You see, if Donald Trump becomes President and gets the chance, he is very likely to sign a national ban that forces women into motherhood and prevents them from getting health care to the point of risking their deaths.
Thankfully, the public and swing voters are very, very against this.
But calling it the “hush money trial” hearkens back toward the headline-grabbing playboy image of Donald Trump prior to politics, who himself has likely paid for abortions. When people think of that guy, they are less likely to believe what is almost certainly true, that–if he can, he will sign a national abortion ban.*
So when we point out Donald Trump’s weakness here, let’s do it in a way that doesn’t undermine the most politically effective case we have against him.
How to Talk About The Conviction
How should we talk about the trial to potential swing voters, then?
Look, all I have to go on is publicly available data, and educated hunches. But it seems from some surveys that the public doesn’t like the idea of a convicted felon in the White House. Including that he was convicted by a jury of his peers might help.
I personally like calling it the “election fraud case.” Or “election cheating” case.
We know people don’t respond positively to the ways Donald Trump tried to prevent the peaceful transition of power last time. We know that Republicans have capitalized on the concept of “election fraud” to build their case for attempting to disenfranchise voters. And just about everyone knows this guy has some level of fraudster in him, and so in addition to it being true, it is believable.
“Election fraud” also has a certain kind of elegant way of capturing the crime here, and it rolls off the tongue much more easily than “falsifying business records in furtherance of another crime.”
Even if that isn’t the formal statutory name of the conviction, this was a case where Donald Trump was found guilty of falsification for the clear intent of defrauding the electorate right before an extremely close election. It could have been decisive in 2016.
He undermined free and fair elections, right from the start.
In other words, Donald Trump has been convinced by a jury of his peers of cheating in the 2016 election.
Tell a friend.
*Interestingly, it is former White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer who pointed out the fact that this image of Trump is why a lot of swing voters assume he won’t sign a ban and why this case isn’t as bad for Trump as some of the other ones. But even Dan often refers to this as the “hush money” case. I think that is a mistake—the case should be used to remind people that Donald Trump is trying to take away freedom by messing with free and fair elections.