Per Mike Allen at Axios, a “reality tremor” caused by the specificity of the revelations in last Friday’s sentencing documents is hitting the right-wing world (which apparently didn’t detect the catastrophic reality earthquake the rest of us did) (emphasis added):
Some top officials are suddenly much more attuned to the political fallout from the Mueller investigation and are growing more anxious about Trump's re-election prospects, according to people close to the president. [...]
One Trump loyalist said after a day of conversation with "hardcore MAGA [Make America Great Again] online influencers": "These are the people most predisposed to believing the 'witch hunt' rhetoric, but they are now expressing real concerns."
- Even these diehards "start looking at the legal stuff and have a hard time dismissing it all," the loyalist said.
- "I think SDNY [the Southern District of New York, where prosecutors said Trump directed Michael Cohen to make hush-money payments to women] has changed people’s perceptions. ... That’s viewed as a greater potential threat to Trump directly than Mueller. 'Collusion' is still met with eye rolls."
- "And even MAGA loyalists are asking why Trump feels the need to go on Twitter with bizarre legal explanations that don’t seem to help."
On that last point, score another negative point to Trump for shooting himself in the foot, which he seems to have a (stable) genius for.
More interesting is the fact that these alt-right types find the hush-money cases more plausible and therefore threatening than the likely conspiracy with Russia. I’ve written elsewhere about the difficulty Americans have with accepting such a shocking and unprecedented reality as a crook stealing the presidency with the help of an enemy superpower. We are seeing it demonstrated here by those for whom it is most difficult: those who threw their support most strongly behind Individual-1. Paying hush-money to silence lovers is much more plausible, even traditional, some might argue, in politics, but still bad behaviour enough for these people to wonder how it might affect his electabililty.
It makes me think that Mueller’s course of action is even more well-thought-out than I thought. I wrote elsewhere yesterday:
I also think ... that Mueller, well-aware that this investigation had to be handled with political as well as legal considerations in mind — which also meant keeping psychological considerations in mind — realized that the American people as a whole would have a hard time accepting that an American presidential candidate would sell out his own country to an enemy superpower. So in his public disclosures he has been very careful to unveil it in an incremental way, letting the public get used to each successive revelation before producing the next, letting them acclimatize to each level. Of course Dems are seeing and accepting it first, followed by swing voters … next comes the peeling off of Republicans, from the most sensible to the least.
So Mueller has not just been careful in indicting lesser offenders before going on to greater ones (which follows the natural course of such an investigation anyway, prosecutors working up the crime food-chain by flipping smaller fish first to catch bigger ones next), but in indicting people for more common and ordinary crimes before the unprecedented ones.
The Axios story goes on to cite an AP story:
But a shift began to unfold over the weekend after prosecutors in New York for the first time linked Trump to a federal crime of illegal hush payments. [...] For some Republicans, the implication that the president may have directed a campaign finance violation, which would be a felony, could foreshadow a true turning point in the Republican relationship with him when special counsel Robert Mueller releases his report on the Russia investigation.
AP cites Sen. John Thune (R-SD) saying that he expects much more to come out both from the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and Mueller investigations, and that campaign finance crimes are serious matters.
Friday brought the first hard evidence that Individual-1 committed the felony of violating campaign-finance law; the hard evidence that he committed the felony of conspiracy with a hostile foreign power to steal an election is coming.
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