One major conceptual problem with the theory that Republicans are rallying around Trump as a result of all these indictments is the well-known axiom that correlation is not causation. It is true that Trump has seen his standing in GOP primary polls rise in the months since his indictment in Manhattan in April, but a bunch of things have been happening in parallel — including the emergence of a large and fractured field of opponents and the remarkable decline of Ron DeSantis’ campaign.
Trump’s significant lead in GOP primary polls may turn out to be insurmountable, but regardless, I strongly suspect that the charges are hurting Trump’s chances of defeating Biden in a general election match-up. Whatever you make of Republican voters’ preferences, we know from 2020 that Trump can’t win a national presidential election without drawing a significant number of self-identified independents, and poll after poll shows them recoiling from Trump as the legal onslaught continues. I do not know whether and to what extent that would hold in a general election contest that is still more than a year away, but I find it very hard to believe that it could actually be good for a candidate running for president to be under federal indictment for trying to steal the last election.
‘This indictment will only break through if people actually read it’
BY JOHN CULHANE
John Culhane is distinguished professor of law at Delaware Law School, where he teaches courses in constitutional and family law.
We now have three indictments against former President Trump, exceeding the total number of indictments against current and former U.S. presidents by…three. A fourth is almost certain to follow, in Georgia. Yet, the first two criminal cases lodged against Trump appear to have done little to dent Trump’s popularity among his hard-core adherents. Recent polls have him swamping his Republican challengers for the GOP nomination, and still posing a serious challenge to President Joe Biden in the 2024 general election. It might well be the case that only a criminal conviction (or convictions) will tilt the political landscape against Trump. Yet that’s not inevitable; this indictment really could matter.
On the merits, the indictment is, by some distance, the most significant of the three. Distilled to its essence, the four-count document charges Trump with related conspiracies that amount to a sustained effort to erode the foundations of democracy by ignoring the will of the voters who rejected his re-election bid, and to thereby reinstall him as president – whatever the cost. It’s just possible that the seriousness of this indictment will finally break through and change public opinion against Trump for good.
It should.
The indictment details alleged instances of interference with state election processes, using outright lies about (phantom) fraud to attempt to alter the results in key states. And it lays out, in clear and abundant detail, the effort to prevent the certification of the election on Jan. 6. Some of these are chilling to read. For instance, Trump allegedly issued a barely veiled threat to Vice President Mike Pence, warning that he’d have to “publicly criticize” him for refusing to delay or upend the election results. That threat raised the antennae of Pence’s chief of staff, who is said to have become so concerned with Pence’s safety that he notified the chief of the vice president’s Secret Service detail. And, as we know, Trump did repeatedly criticize Pence, who then faced threats on his life from the January 6 mob.
But here’s the thing: This indictment will only break through if people actually read it. That’s the only way to shatter the carapace that certain media echo chambers have created to protect Trump’s supporters from inconvenient facts that might make them blink as they emerge from a long slumber.
Read the indictment.
‘One party has opted out of the truism that you can’t have a functioning democracy if you’re not prepared to lose elections sometimes’
BY JOSHUA ZEITZ
Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing writer, is the author of Lincoln’s God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation.
Regardless of the outcome, this time, it’s different. Donald Trump is not the first president to stand accused of corruption. Warren G. Harding, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton each invited legal scrutiny of their official and personal misdeeds. He’s not the first to be investigated or sanctioned for official misconduct in office. Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson earned that distinction. But he is the first president credibly accused of trying to overturn a free and fair election.
It’s fitting that the indictment relies in part on a Reconstruction-era statute intended to protect the right of ex-enslaved people — freedmen, as they were known in the late 1860s — to participate in the political process. Technically speaking, the 1860s and 1870s were the last decades in which American democracy stood on the precipice of collapse. Then, it was Southern Democrats who used every mechanism at their disposal — sham elections, ballot-box stuffing, coercion and violence — to overthrow duly elected Republican coalition governments in Southern states. We saw then the danger that ensues when one party simply opts out of the most fundamental tenet of democratic government, that when you lose an election, you step aside. In a sad coda to the Civil War, the North effectively capitulated and permitted vast parts of the country to operate outside constitutional law. We didn’t operate free and fair elections nationally until very recently, after the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
As was the case during the long interregnum between the 1860s and 1960s, today, the threat is asymmetrical. One party has opted out of the truism that you can’t have a functioning democracy if you’re not prepared to lose elections sometimes. For that reason, this time, it’s different.
‘Everything has followed the same script’
BY BILL SCHER
Bill Scher is a contributing writer to Politico Magazine, the politics editor for the Washington Monthly, and co-host of “The DMZ,” an online show and podcast with conservative writer Matt Lewis.
Donald Trump’s penchant for narcissistic victimhood has been smart primary politics. He effectively announced every one of his indictments before any public acknowledgement from his prosecutors. He seized the opportunity to frame the indictments on his terms, baselessly smearing the prosecutors as political opponents determined to drive him out of the 2024 race. If he had hesitated, other Republicans hoping to turn the page on Trump might have tried to amplify the argument that an indicted or convicted nominee would not stand much chance against Joe Biden, and not leave that case to a few bottom-tier Republican presidential candidates with little standing among primary voters.
Instead, Trump agitated the Republican base, scaring most intra-party detractors into silence, and even compelling most of his own 2024 competitors into echoing his narratives. That is how the previous indictments panned out (as well as the civil jury verdict finding him liable of sexual abuse), and in the first 24 hours following the new charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States, everything has followed the same script.
How well has Trump’s strategy worked to date? Between the 2022 midterms on Nov. 8, in which several Trump endorsees belly-flopped, and March 18, when Trump previewed his indictment by the Manhattan District Attorney for allegedly making illegal payments to a porn star, Trump’s lead over his closest rival in the national Real Clear Politics was basically halved, from 31 to 16 points. Since March 18, that lead has more than doubled, and now sits at 36 points.
Without any collective action on the part of Republican leaders to puncture the conservative media bubble and refute Trump’s narrative, I expect no change in the Republican primary’s current trajectory.
Jack Smith has ‘taken the harder path’
BY AZIZ HUQ
Aziz Huq teaches law at the University of Chicago and is the author of The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies.
The new Trump indictment is both narrow and broad in all the right ways. It is narrow insofar as special counsel Jack Smith did not charge witness tampering, wire fraud or mail fraud charges that (on some press accounts) had been contemplated. It is broad in the sense that it widens the lens from the Jan. 6 violence to allege a sweeping gamut of efforts by Trump and his six unnamed co-conspirators to twist a variety of official tools into instruments of election subversion: The Jan. 6 riot does not appear, indeed, until page 35 of a 45-page indictment.
This is exactly right: The central challenge to democracy here (and globally) in the past decade has been the weaponization of official power — of law — against the exercise of popular judgment though fair elections. That campaign climaxed on Jan. 6; but to focus on January 6 alone would miss that central threat. By sloughing off mail or wire fraud, but zooming out to encompass the various state and federal-focused election subversion schemes, Jack Smith has precisely captured the core of the moral case for prosecuting a former president who is running again for office. When the offenses charged demonstrate a contempt for the basic principle of popular choice, that prosecution does not diminish democracy in the slightest: It puts its shoulder to the wheel, and pushes it forward.