By Kerry Eleveld
Daily Kos Staff
This year, the American people will decide whether they want to reelect a man who has been found guilty of falsifying business records to hide a scheme that deprived voters of critical information in the 2016 election, which he ultimately won.
"It makes the election a referendum of the American people on Donald Trump's criminality," legal analyst Norm Eisen aptly said on “Pod Save America” Thursday night after the conviction.
But between now and the closing of the last poll in November, the country is in for a wild ride. For those who have actually been watching Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, it's abundantly clear that he isn't the campaigner he was in 2016. Today's Trump is more aggrieved, irascible, nonsensical, and inwardly focused. It's not, “Here's what I'll do for you”; it's, “Here's what I'll do to them.” Revenge is the point.
But when Trump first began promising his MAGA supporters, "I am your retribution," in March of 2023, he hadn't been indicted on a single charge yet.
It wasn't until a few weeks later that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg made Trump the first current or former president of the United States to be criminally indicted. Then the indictments starting falling like dominoes: 37 felony counts for mishandling classified documents in June; four felony counts for trying to overturn the 2020 election in early August; the Georgia racketeering indictment a couple weeks later.
Between the summer of 2023 and his conviction this week, Trump has steadily deteriorated. He can't remember whether he's running against President Joe Biden or his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama. He confuses his GOP rival Nikki Haley with former Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He goes on bizarro Hollywood-related riffs about Cary Grant and Hannibal Lecter. He regularly glitches.
And his weird rants have gotten angrier. Just look at his most recent music-accompanied dramatic pause compared to a similar one from nearly two years ago. Trump looks bothered now in a way he never did.
Theories abound about Trump's decline since 2016, but former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has known Trump for over two decades and helped him with debate prep in 2016 and 2020, chalks up at least part of the slippage to the stress of his indictments.
"He has not been very good on the stump," Christie said on the “Hacks on Tap” podcast this week prior to Trump's conviction. "The fact is that this is affecting him. This has affected him in a significant way."
Christie then told a story about dining with Trump roughly two decades ago when he was serving as a U.S. attorney and got word that he had just won a conviction against a former New Jersey state senate president.
"Where does he go now?" Trump asked Christie.
'Well, he's going to prison," Christie responded.
Trump tried again. "Where do they really put him? You're not gonna put a guy like that in prison—like regular prison."
"Yes,” Christie said, “the Bureau of Prisons will decide where he's going, and he's going."
Trump reached over, grabbed Christie’s arm, and said, "Chris, I could never ever do that. I could never go to jail. They tell you when to get up in the morning and when to go to bed, they tell you what you wear, they tell you when you can eat and what you can eat. ... I could never do that."
Christie said Trump is haunted by two nightmares in life: being broke and being in jail.
If Trump were to be found guilty, Christie predicted, "He will get angrier and angrier and more paranoid.”
If Trump's courthouse rant Thursday was any indication, it will not do him any favors with an electorate that is already showing signs of distress about a conviction.
"Are you worried about going to jail?" a reporter shouted as a grim Trump approached the cameras.
Trump ignored the question, kicking off his post-verdict reflections by calling the trial a "rigged, disgraceful" proceeding.
"The real verdict will be on Nov. 5 by the people,” he said, “and they know what happened here, everyone knows what happened here." He was just getting started.
“You have a Soros-backed D.A., and the whole thing—we didn’t do a thing wrong. I'm a very innocent man," Trump insisted.
"Our whole country is being rigged right now," he added, blaming the Biden administration for his conviction and promising to fight for the country and the Constitution.
"We'll fight till the end and we'll win, because our country's gone to hell. We don't have the same country anymore, we have a divided mess. We're a nation in decline—serious decline," he said. "We have a country that's in big trouble."
The more Trump talked, the more his extended remarks began to sound less reactionary and more prophetic.
Trump, now a convicted felon haunted by the nightmare scenario of jail time—with sentencing on July 11, days before the Republican National Convention—is in a very dark place. And it will only get darker.
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