If a reporter were assigned to write about the maiden voyage of a state-of-the-art luxury cruise ship, likelier than not the story would come back describing “pillowy white-capped waves dancing atop the clear blue ocean while the voyagers basked in the refreshing salt spray that was pushed along by a gentle breeze” or something like that.

But if, heaven forbid, there were to be a shipwreck, look for the news coverage to be dominated by descriptions of “desperate survivors in the icy, shark-infested waters swimming frantically toward the turbulently bobbing life rafts on the raging open sea.”

Same ocean, same people. The difference rests on whether one is comfortably aboard ship or faces a fate conditioned on the durability of inflatable untethered watercraft.

That metaphor, though not original, came to mind as the predictable reactions by political figures and partisan pundits to Thursday’s guilty verdict in the trial of former President Donald Trump began flooding social media platforms and vacuumed up all the available time on cable news.

For those on the left, justice was delivered by a clear-eyed jury of ordinary citizens who did their duty to follow the evidence and uphold the rule of law.

From the right came cries of “sham” and “kangaroo court.” The prosecutors, the messaging went, were Democratic dupes bent on political retribution and the jurors blindly lapped it all up and regurgitated the predetermined result.

The one thing on which both sides did appear to agree was that the voters in the Nov. 5 election will have the final say in the rematch between President Joe Biden and his immediate predecessor. They did not, however, agree on what that final say might be.

It’s fair to support the idea that the forces on both sides of the justice/sham divide had prepared reactions for either way the jury decided. Some might have even had their talking points ready ever since the indictment was handed up months ago.

Another thing both sides seemed to agree on was that the verdict was good for business, at least their business. Of course, their business is politics. And politics, like pretty much every business, runs on money. So it’s not surprising that politicians of all stripes rushed to capitalize on the Trump trial’s outcome.

‘Speechless’: Swing state voters react to Donald Trump’s guilty verdict

A little more than an hour after the verdict was announced, the campaign of Democratic U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez of Brownsville blasted out a mass text touting Trump’s 34-count conviction and noted that his Republican opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mayra Flores, is a supporter of the former president. Gonzalez ends with a plea to “chip in” some money in what is expected to be a hard-fought race.

A short time later, the Texas Republican Party hit send on a “Dear Fellow Patriots” email calling the jury’s decision “a stark reminder that the left is relentless in their pursuit to weaponize the justice system against anyone who stands in their way. We cannot allow this injustice to prevail.”

Embedded in that email was not one, not two, but three red buttons linking to the state GOP’s page that encourages people to contribute money or, better yet, set up recurring donations.

Biden’s campaign late Thursday also put out a plea for cash with “Let’s keep Trump out of the White House” in the email subject line. The message didn’t expressly mention the trial’s outcome, just that “the stakes have never been higher” in a presidential election. Such subtlety had been jettisoned by Friday morning.

Whispers, tension, suspense: What happened in court as judge read Trump’s guilty verdict

The second-day email called the likely GOP presidential nominee “a convicted felon” and warned that “Donald Trump’s supporters are fired up and likely setting fundraising records for his campaign.”

As Biden himself might have said, “That’s not hyperbole, folks.”

About the same time Biden’s email hit, the Trump campaign boasted that it had hauled in a record $34.8 million in small contributions and that the pace of donations had temporarily crashed the website. That much cash in that short amount of time can buy any candidate whose campaign ship just hit an iceberg a pretty sturdy lifeboat.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Where both sides agree and disagree on Donald Trump’s guilty verdict