No, The Hush Money Trial Isn’t Helping Donald Trump
But it is hurting the credibility of people who want it to be helping him
If you spend any time in right-wing media, you’ll learn all about how Donald Trump’s New York hush-money trial is a fiasco for the Manhattan district attorney’s office—that the case is obviously meritless, and (since the prosecutor’s motivation must have been political) destined to backfire politically.
Whether Trump is convicted or not, this is the normal way right-wing media lies to its audience, no difference from past efforts such as “the polls are fake, Donald Trump is winning the 2020 election.” Most ethical journalists who’ve covered the trial from the outset and understand the laws at issue wouldn’t venture to predict the verdict. But they would tell you that the prosecutors have ably painted a damning portrait of Trump—they’ve proven he falsified business records (a misdemeanor) and assembled strong evidence that he did so in an effort to cover up other illegal activity (making it a felony).
As to the political question of whether the trial is making Trump more popular with the voting public, or engendering its sympathy, nobody has to predict anything: Before the trial, Trump was more popular (or less unpopular) than he had been in a long time; through the trial, those numbers have slowly deteriorated.
His head-to-head polling against Biden has also not improved. Depending on which model you consult, it’s flat or slipped a little.
Is that slippage because of the trial? I couldn’t say with certainty. But I am also not a columnist for the New York Times. Ross Douthat, by contrast, ignores the data to muse about how the trial might theoretically help Trump among both low- and high-information general-election voters. “Any political effect from being charged and tried is probably working marginally in Trump’s favor,” he writes. “To a normal observer, if the underexplained version of the trial looks like the Lewinsky affair all over again, the uber-explained version might just look like a partisan prosecutor’s overreach.”
This, factually, does not match the numbers (see above). But if I were a tribune for spirituality, and not just trying to mind-trick Democrats into doubting their political advantages, I’d probably be more concerned about the damage Trump and his retinue of pseudo-holy hangers-on have done, and continue to do, to religious conservatism as a salable way of life.