Trump In Jail?

The possibility of prison for Trump when Judge Merchan sentences him on July 11 quickly arose on Friday:

'The View’ co-host Sunny Hostin, who seemed quite pleased with the developments, shared on the air that she had spoken with someone from Bragg’s office.

. . . “I spent this morning speaking to someone from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. They’re called street fighters. He believes that they will recommend a one-year term in prison. And that is because when you spend a year in prison in New York or under, you serve in Rikers Island,” Austin said.

According to Hostin, this recommendation serves not just as punishment but as a stern message to society that such conduct will not be tolerated again.

Victoria Taft at PJ Media answered, Of Course They'll Put Trump in Jail, and Trump himself made it plain that he's fully aware of the contingency:

“I’m okay with it,” Trump said when asked about the potential of house arrest or even jail during a “Fox & Friends Weekend” interview that aired on Sunday. “I saw one of my lawyers the other day on television saying, ‘Oh, no, you don’t want to do that to the president.’ I said, don’t, you know, beg for anything. It’s just the way it is.”

Acknowledging it “could happen,” Trump went on to say, “I don’t know that the public would stand for it, you know.” Trump also said, “I think it’d be tough for the public to take. You know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”

There's no question we're in uncharted territory. My view for some time has been that Biden finds himself in desperate straits much earlier in the campaign cycle, a couple months before the nominating conventions and five months before the election, than any of his predecessors, who like McGovern and Dukakis were only occasonally down in the polls early, while others like Carter and Hillary seemed to be doing well right up to the election. But given what have often now been characterized as dire omens for his reelection prospects, Joe is clearly under pressure to turn things around, and jailing Trump is starting to look like a real option.

The best news of all is that Trump's attorneys are taking this seriously and are presumably pereparing their strategies, which given the nature of such things will be kept highly confidential. On the other hand, a legal defense is only part of Trump's task, which is an overall political campaign, and the odd thing up to now is how well he's been dealing with the circumstances he's been given. As I noted the other day, the pop culture hero is always in a reactive state, it's the thoughtful, devious villain who's always coming up with new obstacles for which the hero must improvise an escape -- and of course, this he does.

This is starting to make centrist Democrats nervous. Thus Dean Phillips, who briefly ran against Joe in this year's primaries, tweeted New York Gov Hochul:

Donald Trump is a serial liar, cheater, and philanderer, a six-time declarer of corporate bankruptcy, an instigator of insurrection, and a convicted felon who thrives on portraying himself as a victim.@GovKathyHochul should pardon him for the good of the country.

— Dean Phillips (@deanbphillips) June 1, 2024

Wait a moment. He's saying Trump is somewhere between Aaron Burr, Tokyo Rose, the Rosenbergs, Jefferson Davis, and Jeffrey Epstein, and he should be pardoned for the good of the country? Why shouldn't Trump be in the supermax with El Chapo, Ted Kaczynski, Ramzi Yousef, and Robert Hanssen? As well pardon all those others. I don't understand.

He's clearly sensing a whiff of impending catastrope.

He's not the only one.

Democratic ex-New York Gov. David Paterson says he would have wanted President Biden to consider pardoning Donald Trump in his hush-money conviction if the prez had the power.

Paterson, speaking Sunday on 77 WABC radio’s “The Cats Roundtable,” agreed with Trump’s gripes that the case was “rigged.

“There are a lot . . . of erroneous qualities to that trial,” Paterson said. “Some of the people who are involved: A person who worked at the White House somehow wound up in the Manhattan DA’s Office.

But the Governor of New York can pardon people for New York crimes, which is Phiiips's rationale. Another former New York governor, George Pataki, has the same worries later in the link:

Former New York Republican Gov. George Pataki joined Paterson in blasting the prosecution of Trump — and both governors warned it could boomerang on Biden and other Democrats.

. . . “They have opened a can of worms here that can go anywhere,” he said of Democrats pushing for Trump’s conviction.

Fragmentary evidence over the weekend suggests the verdict and the potential for a prison sentence are in fact having the opposite of the intended effect.

The stunning felony conviction of former President Donald Trump garnered headlines around the world and created sharp political arguments across the U.S. But did it affect the presidential race? The answer is yes. It seems to have actually helped Trump, the June I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

. . . In the head-to-head poll between President Joe Biden and Trump, it’s now a statistical toss-up, 41% to 41%. But that’s an improvement for Trump from May, when he trailed Biden by 2 percentage points in that month’s I&I/TIPP poll (42% Biden to 40% Trump). The June poll has a margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points.

The conviction and now the threat of prison time have created a fundraising windfall for Trump:

'This might be a little inside information, but as I was leaving my house about 37 seconds ago, I asked my wife, what are we up to now?' Eric Trump told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo on her show Sunday Morning Futures.

And [Lara] said, just in terms of small dollar, we're well over $70 million. This is $21 donations, $43 donations, right, small dollar donations.'

The former president's son continued: 'If you add the large dollar donations to it, you're over $200 million.'

But as Eric Trump suggested, there are lizard people getting on board. My former schoolmate and Clintonista Robert Reich sounds the alarm:

Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House.

The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.

The Daily Mail link just above added this:

Israeli-American Miriam Adelson, the wife of the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has reportedly pledged $100 million to the Trump campaign in the days since his criminal conviction, according to The Forward, a Jewish outlet.

. . . She is the latest of a number of billionaires that have pledged to help the former president regain his grasp on power.

Last week, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman similarly decided to make public his support of Trump.

The private equity behemoth said his decision to back the ex-president was in part motivated by the anti-semitism seen on college campuses in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.

Given this level of support from extremely influential people, along with the likelihood of major consequences from the public if Trump is jailed, I suspect there will be some sort of intervention before this can take place. The basic problem is that Joe has never been fit for office, and as he gets more desperate, he poses a real threat of an unstable interregnum that will happen even before the election.