House Speaker Mike Johnson traveled to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse a couple of weeks ago to show his support of Donald Trump, and in the process, the Louisiana Republican made a familiar mistake.
The GOP congressional leader began by dismissing the trial as a “sham,” before adding, “I think everybody in the country can see that for what it is.”
The more Trump’s legal crises have intensified, the more common this refrain in Republican circles: It’s not just GOP partisans who are siding with Trump and rejecting the criminal allegations, it’s “everybody in the country” reaching the same conclusion. This apparently brings the former president and his allies a degree of comfort.
The trouble, of course, is the evidence pointing in the opposite direction. CBS News reported this week on the results of its latest national poll.
As Donald Trump’s trial in New York City nears closing arguments, most Americans believe he is guilty of a crime in this case. But they are less sure what the jury will do after it deliberates next week. Fifty-six percent — a majority — say Trump is definitely or probably guilty of a crime in this case, in which he has been charged with falsifying business records to hide a “hush money” payment and influence the 2016 election.
Not surprisingly, there’s a sizable partisan gap on the question — the vast majority of Democrats believe the former president is guilty, the vast majority of Republicans believe the opposite — but the bottom line remains the same: For all the GOP assumptions about “everybody in the country” siding with Trump in his ongoing trial, the CBS poll found 56% of Americans agreeing that the presumptive Republican nominee is either definitely or probably guilty.
This comes on the heels of a Yahoo News/YouGov survey that found 52% of Americans agreeing that Trump falsified business records to obscure the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, and a 47% plurality said the former president committed a crime in the process. Both of those numbers went up as the trial progressed.
That data followed a national poll from Quinnipiac University, which found a 46% plurality agreed that Trump did something illegal in the hush money scandal.
This was roughly consistent with the latest national survey from the Pew Research Center, which found that 45% of Americans believe that Trump’s actions were illegal. Meanwhile, a New York Times/Siena College poll, conducted shortly before the trial began in earnest, asked respondents, “Thinking about the investigations into Donald Trump, do you think that Donald Trump has or has not committed any serious federal crimes?” A 54% majority said the presumptive GOP nominee committed serious crimes. In fairness, some recent polling has also shown some public skepticism about the prosecution’s motivations, but that doesn’t change the bottom line: If Trump and his allies believe they’ve convinced the great American mainstream that he’s an innocent man who shouldn’t be on trial, there’s ample evidence to the contrary. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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