As everyone waits to see whether the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will actually indict former president Donald Trump, Washington DC has emerged with a new talking point: Criminal charges will actually help the former president.
Senator Joe Manchin, by far the most endangered Democratic incumbent who hails from a state Trump won by almost 30 points, told Punchbowl News that “I think it could have the reverse effect of what people might be thinking" and actually help the former president.
Senator Marco Rubio told me “for Democrats it’s counterproductive, politically, I think it's gonna backfire.”
However, Montana Senator Jon Tester, who represents a state that also voted for Trump by double digits, told me “nobody's above the law. If he’s guilty of crimes and he's held accountable just like me or you or anybody else".
It’s easy to get that impression after eight years of Trump upending people’s expectations of politics. Trump called John McCain a loser and then went on to win the Republican nomination. Trump won the presidency weeks after the audio of him bragging about sexually assaulting women leaked. And, of course, an overwhelming majority of Republicans opposed impeaching Trump after he incited a riot at the US Capitol.
All of this has led to an impression that the former president is the “Teflon Don.” But as of right now, it seems many are misinterpreting the moment.
“There's this temptation with Trump to attribute method to some of the madness, and I just don't think it's there, largely,” Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster at Impact Research, told me. “I think, myself included, a lot of us have been more wrong about Trump than right about Trump going back nearly a decade.”
Gunner Ramer, the political director of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, offered a reminder that nobody can predict the future. But he said an indictment could do two things.
“I think, in the short term, there could be a rally around Trump,” he said. “But I think the real open question is, long term, is the consequence of an indictment another sort of point for Republican primary voters to look at? And it's a sign of political baggage.”
Ramer said that after the January 6 select committee hearings, support for the former president diminished because even Trump supporters may have still liked him but feared their friends and loved ones would not support him.
That changed after the FBI executed a search warrant for documents from Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, which led to a rally around him. But that ultimately fizzled when his hand-picked candidates flopped in the 2022 midterms.
“And again, it was this political calculation that Donald Trump has too much baggage. ‘I still very much like him, but enough people don’t,’” Mr Ramer said of potential supporters of Trump.
But that doesn’t mean Trump’s opponents will benefit even if an indictment hurts the former president, McCrary said. In the 2016 primary, Trump sucked all the oxygen from the political debate.
“Even when there were attacks on him going after other Republicans, Trump just sort of blocked out the sun,” he said. “And that caused all the other flowers in the garden to wither and die.”
That doesn’t mean he thinks an indictment would help Mr Trump.
If anything, Ramer said, a potential indictment could serve as a boon to the current runner-up: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is set to announce his 2024 campaign sometime in the summer. DeSantis’ numbers have taken a dive in recent weeks after he made an unforced error when he called the war in Ukraine a “territorial dispute” and Mr Trump has hammered his former political protege.
“They very much like Ron DeSantis, but they see Ron DeSantis in relation to Trump,” Ramer said of the Florida governor's supporters. “They see him as someone fighting the culture wars, and, as people said, 'Trump without the baggage.' Trump not on steroids.'”
Of course, all of this is remains hypothetical. As of right now, Trump remains a free man and DeSantis has not officially declared.
But the idea that an indictment will immediately benefit Trump has little grounding in actual facts and is more driven by fear. For Republicans, it’s fear that they will lose his voters if they do not come to his defence. For Democrats, it’s a trauma response after seeing him win one too many times.
