THE NEW YORK TIMES I wanted to write a regular column this week about political disputes and what we can learn from the polls that came out afterward first Republican debate. The focus would be on resilience Ron DeSantisthe success of Nikki Haleythe modest dangers for Donald Trump for the not present for discussion — and finally, about the larger issue of how DeSantis, Haley or any other Republican would be able to concentrate the antiTrump vote rather than simply repeating the fragmentation of 2016.
But would anything we learn from the Republican debate be more significant than the news that the most important case against Trump, his federal indictment for alleged election crimes, will be heard on the eve of Super Tuesday? Probably not. So let’s leave DeSantis and Haley aside for another day and talk about what that means The trial of a wellplaced presidential candidate takes place in the middle of his party’s primary campaign.
In any theory that associates law with democratic deliberation, things seem to be an extremely suboptimal convergence. If we take the trial seriously as an exercise in factfinding and rebuttal, with the presumption of innocence as the premise and the result of a legitimate verdict then, under ideal circumstances, it is clear that the trial of one of the main contenders for the presidency would be over, before voters began to make their own judgment. In less than ideal circumstances, a ruling would be rendered before a majority of votes were cast, which would instill confidence that a majority of voters shared the same knowledge of the court’s decision.
Former President Donald Trump speaks to the press at Atlanta airport after being charged with attempting to overturn the election in Georgia, August 24, 2023. Photo: AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
To their credit, this is exactly what prosecutors have asked for: a start in January, with the trial potentially concluding toward the end of the first phase of the campaign. Instead, we are headed for a situation in which the trial and the campaign will be completely intertwined, and each primary will be linked to a different moment in the course of the case some votes will be cast before the trial, others after the opening statements, others at the same time as it the prosecution’s arguments and others following the defence’s counterarguments.
This, in turn, means that a fundamental problem with these trials as attempts to enforce the rule of law the fact that any viewer can see that the court’s decisions are provisional and that the final arbiter of Trump’s fate is the electorate will be present throughout the legal process continuously highlighted. Republican primary voters will be like a jury in the shadows, reacting in real time, constantly increasing or decreasing the chances that the defendant can overturn a guilty verdict through the easy expedient of becoming the next President of the United States.
The resigned response from many progressives is that there is simply no alternative here, that Trump has committed so many possible crimes that the backlog of cases requires that at least one and possibly several be tried during the primary campaign.
But only one of the four charges, the secret documents caseThese are alleged crimes committed in anticipation of the upcoming 2024 elections. In all other cases, there were convoluted, multiyear prosecution paths that could plausibly have been set in motion so that Trump would face a jury in 2023.
The accumulation is not intentional; the public prosecutors new York It is Georgia did not meet with Merrick Garland and Jack Smith Things were not planned to turn out this way, and the delay at the federal level, one could argue, partly reflected a reluctance to pursue charges. But there is still a recurring pattern in these antiTrump and antipopulist efforts that so often seem to result in tricks and decisions that further undermine trust in officially neutral institutions.
These decisions are often defended by claiming that any criticism is nothing more than a malicious attempt to evict Trump or his voters. Therefore, in this sense, it is necessary to emphasize, not for the first time in this column, that Trump’s voters are responsible for his continued popularity, that he may well seek a new nomination without a backlog of cases, and that prosecutors will force the Republicans voters not to do anything they weren’t already inclined to do.
But that gap appears to be beneficial to Trump’s bid to run again. Yes, there’s always “the possibility that Trump will collapse under the weight of his legal troubles,” as my colleague Nate Cohn puts it. But we will have months of polling in the shadow of these prosecutors, strongly suggesting that within the Trumpist bloc (say 30 to 40% of the Republican electorate) that definitely votes for Trump, there is another bloc that is open Alternatives, but it can be seduced if it is perceived as the progressives’ greatest goal, very similar to the one that united progressives and feminists around the alleged sexual predator Bill Clinton when he was targeted by the religious right.
To defeat Trump in the primaries, his competitors would have to be part of that bloc to resist the urge to unite around the former president and concentrate those voters in your favor. Therefore, linking Trump’s allegations, but not the ultimate outcome of the trial, to some of the key primaries appears to serve more to solidify his nomination than to ultimately cause his numbers to decline in the polls.
A conviction could be something different. There may be Republicans who see the prosecution as theater aimed at preventing Trump’s nomination and are hoping that the trial will end when their lawyers present their defense. A Portal/Ipsos poll released a few weeks ago found that 45% of Republican voters say they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he were convicted of a crime, while 35% (again, that Trumpist bloc) say they would anyway vote and more than 50% say they would not support him in the fall election campaign (Northern Hemisphere) if he were arrested.
I don’t believe this last indicator, but at least the research suggests that trust in the justice system is still high enough that a possible conviction could have a different impact on the Republican primary than previous indictments. However, a conviction before the primaries are decided is exactly what we will not achieve under the current schedule. / TRANSLATION BY GUILHERME RUSSO
*Ross Douthat has been an opinion columnist for The Times since 2009 and author of The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.