Donald Ayer in Salon
Writing in Salon, Advisory Council Member Donald Ayer and Dennis Aftergut addressed Donald Trump’s criminal conviction:
It’s hard to argue with 12 ordinary citizens agreeing unanimously to guilt beyond a reasonable doubt on 34 counts. Jurors are everyday people who have been randomly selected, with the defendant and his lawyers fully able to remove for no stated reason 10 whom they don’t like.
None of this is offered to suggest that the indelible stain on Trump as a “convicted felon” means the election is over and Biden has won. As MSNBC editor Zesham Aleem recently wrote, there’s only one way to ensure that we don’t have a convicted criminal in the Oval Office come January: “crafting a better message, out-fundraising, out-organizing and out-mobilizing.” That’s as true today as it was before the conviction.
But Trump now has a serious blot on his name that is not going away. Being the “convicted felon” in the race is no small liability. We can all remind friends and neighbors of that, or speak out on social media, so that come November, the sensible majority of Americans keep us from having as president a man who was adjudged a criminal by a jury of his peers.