Please give up on ‘convicted felon’

Plus: north woods Chartreuse, perverse equity, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Please give up on ‘convicted felon’

(via Gage Skidmore)

Did you know that President Donald Trump is a convicted felon?

I do, and so does this guy, who is not the famous actor of the same name and does indeed appear to make this identical post daily:

For this and other offerings of exquisite quality, like “❤️ if you think Trump is a piece of shit,” he has amassed a following of 431,000. Ours is truly a land of opportunity.

And it’s not just #resistance accounts that love to make this point. This past Friday, May 30, was the one-year anniversary of Trump’s conviction for 34 felony charges relating to falsifying financial records involving hush money payments to conceal his infidelity from the American electorate. MSNBC had the story, which in its online version was headlined, “Tagged as a convicted felon.”

USA Today took the occasion to dutifully explain—in a piece meticulously optimized to rank highly in search results—that, yes, Donald Trump is still a convicted felon, “though calling someone a ‘felon’ is considered outdated language.” (Not so outdated that you can’t use it to get that search traffic, I guess.)

And that’s just the recent stuff. “Convicted felon” and its variants were particularly popular in the five months between the conviction and the election last year, months in which many of Trump’s critics were apparently certain that this was a sick burn.

The New York Times editorial board was hot out of the gate with “Donald Trump, felon,” as soon as the conviction news dropped, while an article at The Hill in mid-June declared that “polls prove” (prove!) that Trump “can’t brush off ‘convicted felon.’” Even many journalists and commentators whom I generally find thoughtful and canny went in for a bit of “convicted felon” now and then, often tacking it on to some larger, better argument like a little sting.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and this one-year verdict anniversary seems like as good a time as any to finally say: Please stop with this. Please give up on “convicted felon.”

It has not worked, is not working now, and likely never will work at any meaningful scale. In fact, politically speaking—in the sense of desiring to effect change in electoral outcomes and the operations of the state—I strongly suspect that “convicted felon” is worse than useless for opponents of Donald Trump. It’s counterproductive.

My reasoning is twofold. One, look at the polls, especially the most important poll number of all: the election result.

Surveys soon after the conviction showed that a majority of Americans agreed Trump was guilty. But all that really means is that they believe he cheated on his wife with a porn star, then tried to hide it, then cheated on his paperwork to hide that, then got caught. I’m sure the legal case was all very complex and impressive, but anyone who has paid attention to Trump’s public conduct over the last decade will not require much persuading to believe this story. The man is notorious. Of course most Americans believe he did it.

Surveys last year also indicated that even with that agreement about Trump’s guilt, the conviction had little to no effect on the election. The day after the verdict, a plurality said it made no difference to their vote, and those who said it did make a difference largely broke along partisan lines. Even in battleground states, as columnist Ed Kilgore documented at New York magazine, the effect was negligible.

And then, of course, Trump won.

Maybe this is what it felt like when Constantine’s Easter message dropped?

Still, “convicted felon” persists, and my second reason is more important than polling because it’s relevant beyond any one election or even Trump’s remaining time in office. It speaks to long-term rhetorical strategy decisions.

The target audience for this term is persuadable voters, mostly independents but perhaps some moderate partisans on each side. The idea is to peel away marginal Republican votes by appealing to these people’s interest in the rule of law and/or law and order. That would only work under multiple concurrent conditions:

1. these people believe that Trump did what he’s said to have done

2. these people believe that what Trump did is a crime

3. these people believe that what Trump did should be a crime

4. these people believe that the trial was just

At best, the “convicted felon” crowd is getting 2/4 with their target audience:

1. Yes, these voters can believe that Trump did what he’s said to have done.

2. Was that a crime? Ehhh, maybe. I mean, the salacious part is not the crime. The crime is about paperwork and multiple layers of state and federal law. As I wrote at CT when the news broke last year, the details of the case were “at once tortured and surprisingly mundane.” The conviction concerned, per a contemporaneous Times report, “11 counts related to invoices, 12 counts related to ledger entries, 11 counts related to checks.” Honestly, I think this is all too obscure for the average non-lawyer to render a judgment on any basis more substantive than whether or not they already liked Trump.

3. But should it be a crime? A civil penalty, maybe. But a crime? With potential jail time? I think this kind of thing is a stretch for a lot of Americans—or, at least, it is when someone rich and famous is in the dock. Invoices do not exactly thrill the heart. There’s no bloody corpse here, no easily identified injured party (aside from Trump’s wife and son, who get no redress no matter what). And Americans are perfectly capable of distinguishing between questions of morality and legality when we want to do so. All told, my educated guess is that the people at whom “convicted felon” is directed typically don’t think that what Trump did here should be handled as a criminal offense.

4. Another thing Americans sometimes do is jury nullification, which is when you tell the judge that you agree that the defendant did what he is accused of doing, but you also think the law is wrong and the defendant should go free. That’s basically what I think happened to Trump in this case in the court of relevant public opinion. Did he do it? Sure, they can see it. But that doesn’t mean they think there should have been a criminal trial or that the trial was just.

Let me put it another way: Imagine you’re in 𝔶𝔢 𝔬𝔩𝔡𝔢 𝔑𝔬𝔱𝔱𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔥𝔞𝔪 𝔱𝔬𝔴𝔫𝔢 𝔰𝔮𝔲𝔞𝔯𝔢, and you make an argument to one of Prince John’s most miserable peasants that Robin Hood is bad because he’s broken tax laws and been duly tried for it. He’s in the sheriff’s gaol right now, you see, because he’s a convicted felon!

I don’t think the peasant’s going to go for it.

Now, is that a valid comparison? I don’t think so. As a lifelong Robin Hood legend enjoyer, I think it’s bunk. I think Trump’s analogue in that story is the prince, not the outlaw hero, and I’m sure those repeating “convicted felon” think the same.

But the people they hope to separate from Trump and his GOP would not cast the story that way. They would more likely squeeze Donald J. Trump into the Lincoln green and plop him in a Sherwood dale.

“Convicted felon” isn’t going to work on them. Find a better tack.

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Intake

• Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, by Agatha Christie

• Why Christians Should Be Leftists, by Phil Christman, to review

• “There’s a link between therapy culture and childlessness,” by Michal Leibowitz for The New York Times

• We are—so, so slowly, years behind everyone else—getting to the final season of The Crown

• Norseman Olympia—a north woods take on green Chartreuse. Our friends brought it for us from Minnesota, and it’s very good!

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Output

New work:

• The triple Kissinger | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

Newly relevant work:

• The moral confusion around Trump’s felony conviction | Christianity Today, May 2024

Politico, hardly a pro-Trump rag, dubbed the whole thing a head-scratcher. CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria called it “a case of trying the right man for the wrong crime.” Vox’s Andrew Prokop made a detailed case that, though Trump is no “sterling adherent to the rule of law” (true), this is a politicized prosecution: a fishing expedition focused “on an obscure or technical matter” using a novel legal theory and spearheaded by an elected political opponent of the defendant.

• Just allow presidential indictments | The Week, July 2019

• Paul Manafort doesn’t deserve a prison sentence. No nonviolent offender does. | The Week, March 2019

The search for justice should drive us to oppose unnecessary incarceration, especially for the most vulnerable, not to demand harsher sentences for the privileged as a sort of perverse equity. The goal should be reducing unjustified imprisonment for all, not spreading the harm around.

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