Trump Guilty Verdict Would Feed Election-Denial Claims

Plotting his vengeance. Photo: Dave Sanders/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The long wait is nearly over. Barring a hung jury, we should soon know whether Donald Trump will become the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime. Legal writer Ankush Khardori rates the odds of a jury conviction in People v. Trump as “fairly good — but not overwhelming,” and “[p]erhaps slightly more likely than not.” For months, pollsters have tried to discern the likely impact of a Trump criminal conviction in this and other cases (though this is the only one likely to produce a verdict before Election Day) on the 2024 presidential election. But one thing is very sure: If Trump is indeed convicted of illegal conduct in arranging for hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels just prior to the 2016 election, he will denounce the verdict as contrived entirely by his political enemies (in this case Democratic prosecutor Alvin Bragg) to damage his 2024 candidacy, thereby “rigging” the election itself.

So if Trump has to campaign as a convicted criminal, his consolation prize is that he will already have laid the groundwork for contesting or even defying the results, just as he did in 2020. That he has anticipated this development is made very clear by the frequency with which he has talked about the upcoming election as “rigged.” He’s been doing that a lot more during this cycle than he did four years (or eight years) ago, as an analysis by the New York Times shows:

Though the tactic is familiar — Mr. Trump raised the specter of a “rigged” election in the 2016 and 2020 cycles, too — his attempts to undermine the 2024 contest are a significant escalation …

Long before announcing his candidacy, Mr. Trump and his supporters had been falsely claiming that President Biden was “weaponizing” the Justice Department to target him. But it took until March of last year for Mr. Trump to settle on a new accusation: that the multiple legal challenges related to Mr. Trump’s business and political activities constituted a “new way of cheating” in order to “interfere” in the 2024 election. He has made versions of that accusation more than 350 times.

In 2020 you had to be paying reasonably close attention to what Trump was saying to realize he was all but telling us he would not accept defeat. Those who accurately predicted he’d claim victory on Election Night were often mocked as alarmists and conspiracy theorists, and even after the fact, there were claims Trump rejected the results on a sudden impulse.

This time around, you’d have a hard time missing Trump’s preemptive argument that he can only lose if the election is “rigged,” and that his legal troubles prove the fix is in, as the Times notes. He is not mincing words:

[H]alf a year before Election Day 2024 — and after more than a year of pushing the “election interference” line about the criminal charges against him and repeatedly warning that Democrats are “cheating” — Mr. Trump again placed conditions on his acceptance of election results.

“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results,” he said in a May 1 interview with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

A guilty verdict in the New York trial would clinch his case, giving him months to devise a strategy for overturning a defeat in November. His election denialism in 2020 depended on a scenario in which the results were close enough that he could convince supporters he was being robbed of victory by Democrats who stuffed the ballot box with fraudulent mail-in votes. No such precision is required for Trump’s 2024 argument that Biden’s whole campaign revolves around “election interference,” defined as any legal proceedings against the former president in federal or state courts. As the Times observes, it’s a classic Trumpian strategy being deployed with unprecedented intensity:

This rhetorical strategy — heads, I win; tails, you cheated — is a beloved one for Mr. Trump that predates even his time as a presidential candidate. He called the Emmy Awards “a con game” after his television show “The Apprentice” failed to win in 2004 and 2005.

This doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that a “not guilty” verdict in Manhattan would put an end to Trump’s election-denial threats. He can always claim the embarrassment, inconvenience, or cost of being on trial had a fatal effect on his candidacy, and/or that the remaining indictments he faces are smearing his reputation among persuadable voters and discouraging his supporters. Nothing will turn off the MAGA “rigged election” machine other than a reoccupation of the White House.