(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The Republican spin on Trump's guilty verdict is really something [1] ['Daily Kos Staff'] Date: 2024-06-04 As news of Donald Trump's criminal conviction settled in across the country last week, elected Republicans began to spin a narrative that would be a head-scratcher for any political party tethered to reality: that the verdict has single-handedly secured Trump's triumph in November. "Congratulations, progressives," Sen. Mike Lee of Utah tweeted Thursday. "You've just guaranteed Trump's election." Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, gunning to be Trump's running mate, similarly crowed that his "deranged enemies just elected Trump for President again!" It was part of a much larger effort across the Republican Party to paint their biggest liability this cycle—Trump and his proven criminality—as an electoral boon. Republicans immediately rallied around Trump, attacked President Joe Biden for a prosecution that he had nothing to do with, and declared Democrats had made a strategic misstep. "One of the surprising effects of this sham verdict: more black voters will flock to Trump in droves & for good reason," tweeted former presidential hopeful and finance bro Vivek Ramaswamy. "I didn’t think the Democrat Party would be so dumb, but here we are." The Trump campaign used a gaudy $52.8 million haul in the 24-hour period following the guilty verdict to help buttress GOP claims, though all of Trump's biggest fundraising spikes have come in response to his parade of legal woes, as CBS News demonstrated. “There’s no doubt that this verdict has actually unified our party,” Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina told “Fox News Sunday." “Without any question, what we’ve seen is ’Never-Trumpers’ calling me and saying, ’Tim, I’m on the bandwagon now. I’ve seen this two-tiered justice system working against the president of the United States. It could work against me too.'" Scott's claim drew a chuckle Monday from Never-Trumper and Republican strategist Sarah Longwell on CNN. "Yeah, I don't know who he's talking to," Longwell said. "I mean, it is in the name. When we say 'never,' we mean, 'never.'” x .@SarahLongwell25 on Tim Scott claiming Never Trump Republicans are voting for Trump because of his felony conviction: “I mean, it's in the name. When we say never, we mean never because Donald Trump has been unfit from the beginning.” pic.twitter.com/W1C8n6HyXT — Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) June 3, 2024 Longwell mentioned a weekend focus group she conducted that consisted of nine two-time Trump voters who were souring on him. The upshot? "The majority of the group was going to go Biden," Longwell reported. Then Longwell offered her perspective on what's really happening in the Republican Party. "I think Republicans are circling the wagons. They know that being a convicted felon will have an effect on marginal swing voters and so they're doing their best to build a narrative that this is good for Trump," she said. Republicans have been here before, staring down an election in which many pundits favored them to win. But then things started to go sideways. That was the case with the 2022 midterm elections, which historically speaking should have been a Republican rout. To help cement that narrative when polls were trending away from them, Republicans began flooding the polling averages at aggregators like 538 with bogus pro-GOP polls and projecting big 'red wave' energy. Beltway political analysts helped by buying into the narrative hook, line, and sinker. Now, veteran Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg sees a similar pattern at play. "It’s a common tactic in politics, and something Republicans used successfully in 2022," Rosenberg wrote over the weekend in his Hopium Chronicles Substack. "By trying to convince everyone the election is over, that they are going to win and there is nothing any of us can do about it, they are attempting to suppress our enthusiasm, our commitment, our work, our voting. 'Trump is winning' is a volunteer and electoral suppressant, as the 'red wave' was in 2022." Post-conviction polls are already revealing a very different reality from the one Republicans are selling. Take it from registered Republican Bronwen Brown in the swing state of Pennsylvania, who had been weighing casting another ballot for Trump in November. "He's been found guilty on all 34 counts. Do I want to go with that? Probably not," the 72-year-old former opera singer told Reuters minutes after the verdict was announced last week. Republicans are working overtime to wash away the stench of Trump's conviction and portray him as winning—precisely because his conviction has become an unavoidable liability in an election that they smugly believed was a lock. Don't believe it for a second. Trump's unexpected felony conviction on all 34 counts of falsifying business records has thrown the Republican Party into upheaval. Attempts to demoralize and depress the Democratic Party are their only avenue to reclaiming control of the 2024 narrative and the upper hand in the upcoming election. Every day brings a new prognostication that is making President Joe Biden's campaign operatives worry or freak out. Is Donald Trump running away with the election? No. Not even close. 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