Turns out the only thing the Trump conviction changed is what we know about Biden

It’s been 11 days since former President Donald Trump’s conviction in a partisan Manhattan courtroom, and we can now confidently assert it did not have the impact Democrats had hoped for.

For months, Democrats had pinned their hopes on a conviction in any of the four cases Democrat district attorneys and special counsels had brought. While three of the cases — DA Fani Willis in Georgia and special counsel Jack Smith in Florida and Washington — have effectively stalled out, the ugly stepson, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, scored the first 34 goals. The only problem? Turns out they didn’t put any points on the board. And even this conviction might fall apart.

National polls remain basically unchanged. In fact, there’s been movement toward Trump in some cases, like Virginia — long a temptress for Beltway Republicans, spending their money and leaving them with a broken heart and a hangover. It's been 20 years since a Republican running for president went home with those 13 electoral votes. President Joe Biden won the state by more than 10 points. Friday morning, RealClearPolitics moved the Old Dominion into the “toss up” category.

“How the heck can you be undecided at this point?” pollster Frank Luntz asked a post-conviction focus group for the New York Times. He had a point. Both men have been president for four years each. Biden is the leader of the free world; Trump might be the most famous person in it. Biden’s been on TV for 50 years; his first White House meeting was with President Richard Nixon. Trump’s been a star for 40, through ups and downs, bankruptcies and triumphs. Neither have given America a single month since their debuts without their names somewhere in the news or on the TV.

And that’s just the thing about these convictions. What did they tell Trump haters and independents that they didn’t already know about Trump? That he’d probably slept with Stormy Daniels? That scandal broke in 2018, back when creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti was still a corporate media darling. We knew this about Trump. It’s part of the deal.

Here’s what we didn’t know: that the Democrats and their self-proclaimed healer in chief are willing to put their political opponents in prison. Indeed, Republicans have been able to use that revelation to even the playing field in the one place they really were trailing Democrats: fundraising. In a race as tight as this one, that's the sort of thing that makes a difference.

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IN OTHER NEWS

The Bibi trap

Congress and Israel finally set a date for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s joint address to Congress, and with it, an impending disaster for a Democrat Party unwilling to behave.

For all the talk of “norms,” top Democrats are furious that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeen Jeffries (D-N.Y.) agreed to the invitation of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to the wartime PM. While the two leaders have pointed out that it’s simply good manners and precedent, a goodly number of their colleagues aren’t having it.

“You do not honor a foreign leader by addressing a joint session of Congress who is currently engaged in creating the worst humanitarian disaster in the modern history of this country,” liberal stalwart Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) complained on MSNBC.

Forty-two Democrats bucked the White House last week when they joined Republicans on Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy’s bill sanctioning the International Criminal Court for its Netanyahu arrest warrant. Biden warned that the sanctions were overbroad.

Democrat civil war has been on stark display since shortly after the Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel. While campus occupations, protests, and riots tapered off with the end of the school year, summer brings its own brand of liberal church: The D.C. protest road trip. On Saturday, tens of thousands of pro-Hamas activists poured into the capital on charter buses from all around the country to surround Biden’s White House, where they vandalized American history, attacked police, and set off smoke bombs.

Looks like you can wave your keffiyeh goodbye to any sort of unity in the lead-up to the 2024 election.

Blaze Video: Huge pro-Palestine protest surrounds White House, smoke bombs set off, progressives demand 'butcher' Biden be arrested for war crimes

Blaze News: Former Bernie Sanders staffer says her anti-Israel speech is being suppressed after The Hill fires her

The fire rises: Compact: Ending Big Tech’s child exploitation

Social media gobbles up children. There’s no getting around it. Suicide rates, depression, gender dysphoria, and eating disorders are up in every country where kids have easy access to cell phones and the social media platforms they host. At the same time, the tech titans who shield their own kids from using their products have taken advantage of our libertarian impulse to shield their business model. The good news is that politicians are finally waking up. Zephyr Teachout reports:

Social-media firms raked in $11 billion in U.S. ad sales from minors in 2022 alone. Yet even that astronomical figure doesn’t capture the economic value that these giants derive from addicting children to their platforms. Meta, Google, TikTok, and Twitter are over-incentivized to try to ban, delay, and weaken all efforts to decommercialize children’s social media.

But now, that focus on exploiting teen emotions has come back to bite Big Tech. Parents—who for a decade blamed themselves in isolation for the rising depression, anxiety, and self-harm among teens—are now joining together to demand that social media, the central institution of their children’s lives, be made safe. Bipartisan parents’ groups are building a new movement; 2024 is turning out to be the year that we will stop gross and deadly exploitation of children’s emotions for profit.

Friday marked a major development in this battle. By a nearly unanimous bipartisan vote, the New York legislature passed landmark legislation that goes straight at the exploitation business model. The New York approach—a version of which has also been introduced in both California and Kentucky; talk about bipartisan!—is disarming in its simplicity. The laws prohibit three different design features for minors on social-media platforms: targeted feeds, notifications between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m., and commercialization of children’s data. (It’s a default measure: All of those design features can be deployed if there is verifiable parental consent.)...

Bedford: Big Business’s century-long war on kids