The New York Times
If you intend to criminally indict and bring to justice a former US President, particularly one whose political career has benefited from the decline in popular confidence in the neutrality of our institutions, you would do well to have clear evidence and a mountain of precedent to decree Support your action. .
That doesn’t appear to be the case in the lawsuit New York prosecutors are considering against Donald Trump. The lawsuit alleges that payments to ensure the silence of porn star Stormy Daniels violated campaign finance laws. The use of the term “innovative legal theory” in descriptions of what the measure might entail is not encouraging.
The questions raised by journalists and pundits are also not known to be encouraging for Trump. Or the fact that we have the precedent of a presidential candidate, Democrat John Edwards, accused of committing a very similar crime during his 2008 campaign. He was acquitted of one charge and the jury couldn’t decide on the other some . . .
The precedent of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky is less problematic from a legal point of view, since it involves false testimony in court rather than campaign finance laws.
But the Bill Clinton scandals established the general principle that presidents are above the law so long as the rapes involved petty crimes involving lewd sex. If a potential lawsuit against Trump requires that principle to be overturned, prosecutors could practically show up in court with Democratic Party paraphernalia—the effect would be the same.
This effect need not benefit Trump politically to make such a lawsuit reckless or unreasonable.
A criminal complaint would hurt him in the elections and it would still be a bad idea. It would set a precedent that would pressure Republican prosecutors to indict Democratic politicians on similarly dubious charges and would set a pattern for retaliating in court against the party not in power and transforming polarization would encourage into hostility.
But there seems to be no getting around the political question: will a criminal indictment help or hurt Trump in his bid to retake the Republican nomination and presidency?
Even an apparently politically motivated indictment will not do anything to endear Trump to the independent voters who decide presidential elections. It will be just extra baggage for a politician who is already widely seen as chaotic, immoral and unfit for the presidency.
And even an unimpeachable indictment would be viewed as prosecution by Trump’s most devoted supporters. So whether there is a wave of MAGA protests or not [referente ao slogan “Make America Great Again”] Now we could predict that the spectacle that sees Trump on trial would help mobilize his base in 2024.
Politico’s Alexander Burns argues that these two points add up to a negative outcome for Trump. After all, he doesn’t need to mobilize his base. Most of her will support you no matter what. It is doubt or exhaustion that must convince him that he is the right choice for 2024. And if even a few of those voters tire of another round of Stormy Danielsesque filth, Trump will be worse off. Burns writes: “When every scandal or faux pas brings him 99% closer to his base and upsets the 1%, that’s still a lost formula for a politician whose base is an electoral minority. Trump can’t lose an iota of support every controversy, but make up for it in volume.”
I’m not sure if it’s that simple. Because alongside the true grassroots voter (who will be with Trump anyway) and the true swing voter (who probably tipped the scales for Joe Biden last time out), there’s the swing voter of the Republican primary: the voter, the part of Trumps base in the general election but doesn’t love him unconditionally the voter open to Ron DeSantis but vacillating between the two Florida Republicans depending on the headlines of the time.
I can tell you two stories about how this type of voter reacts to a criminal complaint. For one thing, Trump does well with these voters whether he’s out of the headlines or on the offensive, and fares even worse when he’s weakened, confused, and looking like a loser.
This explains DeSantis’ rise in the polls immediately after the 2022 midterms, when the poor performance of Trumpbacked candidates damaged the former president’s image, while his stubborn criticism made him seem powerless thereafter. This is also due to his apparent recovery in recent polls as he faced DeSantis without the Florida governor hitting back, making Trump appear stronger than his rival.
According to this theory, even a politicized and partisan impeachment returns Trump to a position of shaky excitement that makes him look more like a victim than master of events—a stumbling loser caught in the liberals’ net. So the Republican swing voter, like the swing voter in the general election, withdraws, and the disciplined DeSantis benefits.
But there is an alternate history in which our swing Republican voter is less interested in specific candidates than in the larger struggle against the liberal political establishment.
According to this theory, DeSantis’ image is based on him being a combatant, a scourge of cultural liberalism in all its forms, while Trump has lost the impression that he is more interested in fighting his Republican compatriots when he gets this far goes to hurt the Republican cause and help the Liberals win.
But what happens when institutional liberalism seems determined to take on Trump? (Yes, I know that a single promoter is not institutional liberalism, but that’s how you will see the situation.) When suddenly the great ideological battle about Trump as a person, his position, his own freedom is being fought?
Well, that seems to corroborate the argument some Trumpists have been making for some time: that the establishment fears nothing more than a Trump restoration, that “they can’t leave him behind,” as a former White House official implied to Trump, Michael Anton. So if you’re concerned primarily with ideological conflicts, it doesn’t matter if you don’t love Trump the way his true supporters love him: where Trump stands, there you must stand.
This is the closest conceivable rallying effect for Trump when a criminal indictment bears fruit: not a burst of support for Trump personally, but a repetition of the “enemy of my enemy” dynamic that was critical to his resilience. .
Since at least some Democrats would be happy to see Trump as the Republican nominee instead of DeSantis, it could be argued that in this scenario, belligerent conservatives can be lured into fighting on the wrong battlefield in defense, the wrong leader, for the wrong bets.
But convincing them of that will have to be done by DeSantis himself, whose campaign makes one of those two narratives about Republican psychology seem prophetic: the first as victorious, the second as defeated.
Translated by Clara Allain