You may be aware that a convicted felon is now the presumptive 2024 presidential nominee of the Republican Party. Twelve ordinary citizens, chosen by mutual consent of both sides’ attorneys agreed that Trump was guilty of election interference involving the payment and coverup of hush money for a porn star with whom he was committing adultery while his wife was pregnant. Their guilty verdict was unanimous on all 34 felony counts.

By the way, this election interference jury verdict extends Trump’s impressive losing streak with jurors to 42. In four criminal and civil trials, 42 jurors have weighed the evidence, and all 42 jururls have found Trump and his company to be guilty. 0-42!

Winning so much, he’s sick of winning?

From a political standpoint, the problem with this guilty verdict is what the problem always is with Trump: The swing voters who will decide this election have repeatedly shown that they have the attention spans of gnats. Their memory of the felony conviction will significantly fade, unless they’re frequently reminded.  

Those swing voters are already chasing distracting new “shiny objects” that are regularly tossed out by Trump —  the shark/electric boats lunacy, the Hunter Biden conviction, the veepstakes humiliation derby, etc. Those kinds of issues will continue to distract swing voters from the potential of having a felonious president.

The next stage in the election interference hush money trial is sentencing, which happens on July 11.  On that very important day, the judge will announce his sentence for Trump.

From a political standpoint, I don’t like the idea of giving Trump jail time, house arrest, or anything like that. Polls show that swing voters feel incarceration would be over the top. Given that, I don’t want a jail sentence to inadvertently help Trump’s electability. 

If I were the judge, the sentence I hand down to Trump would sound reasonable to most swing voters, to disarm his attempts at achieving martyrdom. At the same time, my sentence would serve to regularly remind voters that Donald J. Trump is a criminal, and not an ordinary presidential candidate.

This would be my sentence: For two days per week for the next six months, Trump would do something many criminals are forced to do, community service in the form of picking up garbage.

A community service sentence will strike Trump haters as outrageously lenient. I get that. After all, covering up the porn star affair in the wake of the Access Hollywood scandal may have swung an election that Trump only won by an estimated 80,000 votes in three key states, though we can never know for sure. In addition, Trump repeatedly violated his gag order during the trial, which endangered the jury and court employees. He continues to collaborate with convicted criminals, is wholly unrepentant, and has several prior convictions on his record related to business fraud, sexual abuse, defamation, and tax fraud.

Still, hear me out. A 30-day community service sentence would seem reasonable to many moderate swing voters, so it would be more difficult for Trump to use the sentence to politically empower himself through martyrdom. That’s very important.

Moreover, imagine how this garbage pick-up sentence would look through a campaign lens. Twice every week for the remainder of the campaign, the news coverage of the presidential campaign would show images of a humiliated and seething Trump picking up rubbish in brightly colored safety gear with a supervisor watching him closely.  The 30 times that millions of American voters would see this image of Trump on the news serving alongside other disgraced, unrepentant common criminals would repeatedly hammer home what Trump truly is: A disgraced, unrepentant common criminal.

This kind of community service sentence would strike most swing voters as fair and reasonable. At the same time, though, 30 campaign days with images of Trump in orange or yellow safety gear picking up trash would make it much more difficult for voters to forget that Trump is a convicted felon, and not a normal candidate.

For a candidate whose cover-up of hush money robbed 2016 voters of key information they deserved to have for evaluating Trump’s fitness for office, ensuring that 2024 voters are regularly reminded of Trump’s election interfence conviction is apt restorative justice. So, hand the convicted felon his orange gear, rubber gloves, and Hefty bag, and put him to work, as news cameras capture every delicious minute.