Former President Donald Trump has just gone through the first week of his criminal hush payment trial in Manhattan — and it's already hurting him politically, said commentator Molly Jong-Fast on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House" on Friday evening.
The conventional wisdom for months has been that the Trump trials, and particularly the Manhattan trial, will not significantly impact him, with large numbers of voters simply not caring about it. But this ignores that a great many non-Trump supporters would need to vote for Trump to get him elected — and, Jong-Fast said, this trial makes it less likely.
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"I have never bought that," said anchor Nicolle Wallace. "And I found it so disorienting that I sat through a bunch of Trump speeches. He does deal with Mar-a-Lago. He says the [Presidential Records Act]. It's his defense for the facts in the Mar-a-Lago case ... his events start now with this whacky song recorded in prison by the insurrectionists. He's wrapped up in the crimes he allegedly committed in Mar-a-Lago and on January 6th. He wants nothing to do with these facts."
"And he's also running on, I'm not a criminal, but I did crimes, but they are not crimes when you're president," said Jong-Fast, adding that she can't imagine how "middle of the road voters" would accept any of that. "He's sitting here in a courthouse. He's maybe dozing off, maybe not, he looks tired, he's bored, he's complaining it's cold."
"He's fallen asleep twice," agreed Wallace.
"And the reality is this is not a good look for a presidential candidate," said Jong-Fast. "There's a reason that people running for president don't go through criminal trials. There's a reason they avoid scandals like this one. Voters don't like it. It may seem obvious... but I think we as pundits have cooked ourselves into such a frenzy... the reality is this is a bad look."
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