Why Donald Trump's Sentencing Doesn't Matter | Opinion

I'm involved in the media. Every day. I either write, appear on radio and TV, or help reporters with expert commentary. I understand the profound power of the media and how resonant and viral messages can be.

So, as I reflect on what will forever be known as the Trump Verdicts, I look at this in a much more linear fashion than I generally look at anything—and that is the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity former President Donald Trump's 34 felony convictions present to the Democratic Party in the upcoming presidential election.

I'll make this as short and direct as I possibly can: all that the Democrats need to do from this moment forward until the beginning of November is make a really big sandwich board that says, "The Republican Nominee Is a Convicted Felon."

I'm not being sarcastic, that's how clear the opportunity is. Donald J. Trump was found guilty of not one, not five, not even 12, but 34 felonies. That's all we need to know. It doesn't matter what his sentence is, and it doesn't matter that he will appeal the verdict for as long and as far as he can appeal it. What matters is that he was found guilty of (again—I'm trying to show how repetitive this needs to be) 34 felonies.

Yet I remain convinced that the Democratic Party will find a way to make this infinitely more complicated than it needs to be.

It doesn't matter how absurd the polls seem. Polls serve a purpose but because they are based on what people say they're going to do instead of what they actually do; polls have limits. So even though, shockingly and remarkably, only one in 10 Republican registered voters said to pollsters that they're less likely to vote for Trump following these 34 felony convictions, the result may (or may not) be different.

It's going to take us days or weeks or even months for last week's events to sink in. We have a former president of the United States who is running to once again become president of the United States having been found guilty of 34 felony counts in an American court of law.

It's impossible for me to digest this, as I'm sure it is for many of you. But regardless of what it's going to take for us to wrap our minds around this, it is now the omnipresent reality.

So, how hard should it be for the Democratic Party to just be a well-trained chimp and hit this food pellet button 24 hours a day from now until the election? Whether it's on TV, on the radio, on signs, or in a debate, there should be a clean and simple message—that the other guy running for president is a convicted felon.

But now the analysis, unfortunately, gets much more complicated. As Attorney Sarah F. Dooley pointed out to me in a conversation yesterday morning, "We are living in a reality where we will test people's comfort level in voting for a candidate with 34 felony convictions is legally, politically, and historically significant."

From where I sit, that significance is as scary as heck. It's also scary from a media perspective, which I'd like to unpack a little bit for you here.

While the job of getting President Biden a second term seems to have been made 99.9 percent easier, that 0.01 percent looms remarkably large. There are going to be an infinite number of conversations in Democratic back rooms, which surely began during the trial, trying to figure out how to deliver the message that I've already delivered multiple times in this article.

And the problem is that the Democratic Party is going to find ways to over-complicate it. This I can guarantee.

At first, I was going to write something like "That's not to say that the GOP wouldn't probably also find ways to over-complicate it if they were in this ridiculously enviable situation," but as I reflect on that, I don't think they would. In 2024, making simple things harder than they need to be seems to be in the unique purview of the Democratic Party.

In 2024, delivering a pure, clear, and simple message is different than it once was. We don't consume media like we used to, nor do we produce it in the same way. If this was the old days, whatever the old days were, and we were only looking at producing content for TV screens, it would be very different.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Doug Pray's "Art & Copy," a documentary about the remarkable power of advertising. In the film, Pray covers the awesome "Morning in America" Reagan TV ad that contributed to his winning re-election in 1984. You need to take a look at this ad because it's political perfection.

The bar can't be set that high today because we have to go to different places to consume different content and we consume it in different ways. What works on YouTube might not work on TikTok, and what works on TikTok isn't going to work on the news streaming services, and certainly won't work on local broadcast affiliates.

So, in that way, the job for the Democrats is a little more challenging. But it's not that much more challenging and, again, I say this as someone who works in and with the media.

All you need to do is figure out where to deliver your clean and simple message—that the person running for president from the GOP is a convicted felon. Just drive that home anywhere and everywhere you can every single hour of every day between now and November.

I'm going to be watching for tomorrow, and for the 153 tomorrows between the time I finished writing the piece and the November election. And I know it's going to drive me crazy, and I know I'm going to be constantly and consistently disappointed by an endless series of Democratic Party unforced errors caused by making the simple complicated.

About Aron Solomon

A Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, Aron Solomon, JD, is the chief strategy officer for Amplify. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. Aron has been featured in Newsweek, Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, CBS News, CNBC, USA Today, ESPN, Abogados, Today's Esquire, TechCrunch, The Hill, BuzzFeed, Venture Beat, The Independent, Fortune China, Yahoo!, ABA Journal, Law.com, The Boston Globe, and many other leading publications across the globe.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.