Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is warning Democrats that former president Donald Trump’s conviction in his hush-money trial is likely to “backfire” against them.
Kennedy told Fox News that Trump’s conviction on all 34 felony counts is likely to create voter concerns about political weaponization of the justice system.
“This conviction is going to backfire on the Democrats,” Kennedy said. “I think every time that President Trump has been indicted, that his approval ratings actually increase, his popularity increases. I think there’s a large number of Americans who are going to see this as the politicization . . . the weaponization of the enforcement agencies, and I think it’s going to hurt. It’s bad for our democracy.”
He went on to say that Democrats feel they have a candidate who “cannot win fair and square in the polls, and so they have to win in the courts.”
“They have to win by clearing the deck and getting their other opponents out of the race,” he said. “I’m not a fan of President Trump’s, but I want to win. I want to beat him in a campaign on a level playing field.”
The next step on the former president’s winding path through the criminal-justice system will be a meeting with a probation officer, who will use the interview to compile a pre-sentencing report. Trump’s sentencing will follow on July 11, four days before the Republican National Convention kicks off in Milwaukee. He faces up to four years in prison, though legal experts who spoke to National Review agreed that probation is the more likely punishment.
At that point, Trump will almost certainly file an appeal and be released on bail pending the outcome of the appeal process, which could take a year or more.
A normal appeals process would see the case work its way through the New York state courts, where Trump’s legal team would bring forward errors that arose in the trial under state and federal constitutional law. But Trump’s team is likely to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene quickly to resolve his appeal, as it will likely rest on federal rather than state law, explained Zack Smith, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Florida and a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Still, Smith says he would not expect the appeals process to be sorted out by the November election. And nothing in the Constitution prevents a convicted felon from running for president.
Meanwhile, the conviction has served as a fundraising boon to the Trump campaign, which announced Friday that it had raised nearly $53 million in the 24 hours after the conviction.
A new Morning Consult poll released Saturday found that 49 percent of independents believe Trump should end his campaign because of the conviction; just 15 percent of Republicans said the same.
Still, the poll finds Biden and Trump neck-and-neck, with the president leading the former president by just one point.