Donald Trump's Trial Is a Rorschach Test

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

44% : Later, when Trump asks if they'll pay cash, Cohen responds, "No, no, no, no, no.
44% : Cohen surely will testify that Trump was in on not just the payments but also the internal bookkeeping around them.
43% : But it's not entirely clear whether Trump was involved in the actual logging of those payments in the internal records of his business -- remember, that's the crime.
41% : Trump plainly knew about the payments and signed some of the checks to reimburse his former attorney (turned star prosecution witness)
39% : Even if we net that out, a 25 percent swing away from Trump among independents is substantial, and in a razor's-edge election, that number could well make all the difference.
38% : Already the first American president or former president to face indictment, Trump could soon become the first to sustain a felony conviction, and it's possible he could lose the 2024 election -- and eventually wind up behind bars -- as a result.
36% : Cohen explains to Trump, "I've spoken with Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up," referring to the Trump Organization CFO.
35% : If the jury finds Trump guilty on the business-records charge, the next question is whether he falsified the records in furtherance of some other crimes -- primarily here, according to the DA, campaign-finance violations.
35% : While Trump would face a maximum of four years behind bars in this scenario, the vast majority of (but not all) first-time, nonviolent class E felons receive probationary sentences and fines but no prison time.
33% : Recent polling by Politico and Ipsos is insightful, if a bit confounding: 36 percent of independents said a conviction in the Manhattan case would make them less likely to vote for Trump in 2024.
32% : The crime is a paperwork offense relating to how Trump and his businesses logged a series of perfectly legal (if unseemly) hush-money payments in their own internal records.
31% : Trump did what he did -- but is it really a crime, and do we really care?
31% : (Note that "independents" and "undecideds" are not necessarily the same thing; I suspect many of these independents already have their mind made up about, and against, Trump.)
28% : Trump fudged the records, the theory goes, because he didn't want the alleged affair with Daniels to become public and harm his then-ongoing presidential campaign.
25% : Donald Trump is about to face trial for conduct that happened eight years ago; if you have kids in college now, they may have been in elementary school when it all went down.
25% : The question, as ever with Trump, is whether the outcome -- even one as stark as a criminal conviction -- will make a dent.
24% : The DA alleges Trump had the hush-money payments fraudulently recorded in his internal books as "legal expenses" (rather than, I don't know, "hush money to porn star").
22% : So Trump knowing about the Daniels payoff -- and he clearly did -- is merely a starting point here and insufficient to prove anything criminal.
21% : Donald Trump is about to face trial for deceiving the American voters and attempting to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
18% : In fact, when Cohen secretly recorded his then-client talking about a hush-money payment to another woman in 2016, Trump seems clueless about the accounting mechanism.
17% : To keep his listing campaign from capsizing, Trump and his team paid off porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged extramarital affair and then labeled those payments "legal expenses."

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