The moment is unprecedented. Trump is a histrionic and self-indulgent character. No one knows how he will react if he finally becomes the first former US president to be detained and prosecuted. He doesn’t give clues. On Saturday he went to a wrestling championship after announcing his own arrest, which would have predictably occurred this Tuesday had it not been for his strategy of presenting witnesses to the grand jury to testify and delay an indictment. The tycoon talked with the fighters and let himself be cheered on surrounded by supporters present on the field. At no time did he reveal a gesture of concern.
Public immersions are part of his therapeutic remedy for adversity. Following the payment of money to the porn actress Stormy Adams to buy her silence for a sexual ‘affair’ in 2006, the matter that could put her on the bench, these days the occasion on which the Republican leader confessed in ‘ Access Hollywood’ how on more than one occasion he had touched women’s genitals without their consent. It was 2016. The party summoned him to abandon his candidacy for the White House red with shame and disbelief and he simply went out on the streets to let himself be loved by his followers. On January 6, 2021, during the presidential confirmation of Democrat Joe Biden, he wanted to do something similar. Another mass bath, but big and angry. The result is that hundreds of extremists stormed the Capitol. Today there is a similar fear in the courts of Lower Manhattan, although the FBI affirms that neither the messages inciting protests detected on the Internet nor the masses willing to take to the streets are as critical as in that case.
What may happen in the next few days is unknown. If he is formally charged, the former president has two options: turn himself in or be arrested. In the latter case, the New York authorities would request his transfer to Florida, the state where he resides and which has become his fort and rest area. It is possible that the Police finally had to go to his Mar-a-Lago mansion and take him out in handcuffs. But it seems to be a minor possibility. His lawyers would already be negotiating with the prosecutors the delivery formula.
It shouldn’t be easy. The tycoon seems to have considered all the options, including those of allowing himself to be arrested and doing the walk before the media with the shackles on. The profile is so bold that he has even asked his advisers if he should smile or be circumspect at such moments. There are not many people who rehearse in front of the mirror the capture of him by the Police. But Trump is known to be an outlier and loves the show. His electoral team believes that, in the medium term, this image could be counterproductive: nobody votes for president in handcuffs.
This past weekend, during a meeting with voters and Republican leaders, he already made several considerations regarding the fact that a formal accusation, and the police paraphernalia that entails, could propel him towards victory in a primary. All this, fueled by the fuel of a corporatist base and inflamed because of the “injustice”, as Trump himself describes the possible imputation of him. What he has conveyed to his collaborators is that he does not want to give a feeling of defeat or shame.
no bail
In the event that the grand jury decides on an indictment verdict, the prosecutor must ratify it. The accusation would be followed by the reading of the charges attributed to him and the setting of judicial precautions pending trial. Given who he is, chances are he would get off on charges. At most with a deposit. No one believes that Trump ends up in preventive custody, and even less for the type of crime he was tried for, nor that he thinks of going on the run, among other reasons because he considers himself innocent. The general opinion among the columnists is that he will stand up and try to obtain the maximum of political profits.
The environment of the Republican leader does not hide that he is satisfied with his return to the center of the political arena. After announcing his own arrest (the rumor was already running through political circles and newsrooms on Friday), Trump once again receives the warmth of his own and has united the Republicans around his figure. Today he is covered by those who continued to support him loyally, those who criticized him and even those who will probably be his rivals in the race for the presidential nomination, such as Mike Pence. The polls are more favorable than ever. And he has reactivated hundreds of thousands of ‘Make America Great Again’ activists, who in recent times saw him diluted and leading enthusiastic acts but far removed from the fervor of yesteryear. In a rather minor key, solidarity demonstrations have returned to the streets.
There are quite a few dualities in this bizarre process, which for a while will at least give the former president a good life, retired for months to a routine of golf, office work out of the spotlight, in the privacy of his home, and dinners with guests who they pay to sit in the same room at the Mar-a-Lago club near him. Far from sinking, the opportunity is propitious for him to neutralize, at least momentarily, his main rival in the primaries, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who has not yet presented his candidacy, but who, out of party solidarity, may have to curb his long run. list of complaints against the former president. The traffic light turned amber this Wednesday, when a poll revealed that Trump has 56% support among conservative voters while DeSantis has fallen to 25%, the lowest record since his possible candidacy began to be rumored. The tycoon remains magnetic to the bases.
The second spiral is that the man who ran the system for four years can now go on to denounce that he is persecuted by that same system. His defense is already selling him as the victim of “persecution” and some far-right commentators have not been slow to link the possible charge for paying a porn actress with the “electoral fraud” that removed him from the White House, as if everything was part of the same conspiracy. Although there are crazier theories. Conspiracy theorists link the impeachment of the former president to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as a maneuver orchestrated by shadowy forces (and obviously Democrats) in order to make the United States collapse.
There is still a third paradox. What will happen if the tycoon is chosen by his party as a presidential candidate and, even further, wins the 2024 elections? The initial calculation is that a judicial process of this type can last between one and two years. If convicted, he would be the first president to enter the White House under the threat of imminent conviction for a felony. And if he is exonerated, he will be at least forced to divide his electoral time between the campaign and his defense in court, another no less unusual fact. If anyone thought that Nixon had reached an extreme situation, he still did not know the tycoon. However, all this calculation is absolutely futurible, a hypothesis for analysis on uncharted territories in US politics.
“Full spectrum” response
A Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, has assured that on his team there is “a full-spectrum response operation that can deal with anything that comes our way.” In other words, the man is ready. The team justifies him in the numerous attacks that his boss has suffered since he decided to run for president of the United States in 2016, as if everything, absolutely everything, was the result of a plot against him. But the reference to a “full spectrum” response can also be interpreted by the other investigations that weigh on the conservative candidate, including his alleged relationship with the Capitol riots or with the pressure exerted in Georgia to annul the votes in favor of Joe Biden. in previous presidential
Victimism is profitable. It is what people expect. Only since Saturday, the former president has collected donations worth 1.4 million euros. It happened before. After his electoral defeat in 2020, millions of people supported his victimization theories, bought his shirts in demand for justice and pressured, beyond the invasion of the Capitol, in favor of the arguments of the Republican leader. It is only necessary to remember the seizures of vote counting machines by the Trumpists, eager to find signs that they had been manipulated in favor of Biden. Or the past mid-term elections in November, when groups of vigilantes, many armed and dressed in camouflage, posted themselves in front of the polling stations. The seizure of secret government documents in the Mar-a-Lago mansion returned a few months ago to raise a wave of support for Trump and intimidation even of the FBI agents in charge of the operation.
Security has now been tightened around the courts and prosecutor Alvin Bragg, who is handling the case of the payments. Bragg, 49, grew up in Harlem. He became a Manhattan district attorney last year; he the first black to serve in office, making the allegations of “racism” by Republicans even more absurd. He is considered a hard-working professional. Before the Prosecutor’s Office, he practiced as a civil rights attorney. He represented the mother of Eric Garner, the African-American man suffocated by a police officer in 2014. The highly popular case forced a change in practices in the New York police force.
The security services have decided to put him under an escort and police fences surround his office to prevent any group of angry Trumpists from committing anything foolish. Beyond small concentrations, hate messages or calls for mobilization on extremist web pages, the FBI sees no indication that the Capitol revolt can be reproduced in Manhattan, although everything will depend on the course of the process, if it arrives. to be celebrated A critical moment would be when Trump appears in court.
Many Republicans fear a new explosion of hatred a year before the presidential elections, but it is also true that these days they have not saved on fuel. The president of the majority in the Chamber, Kevin McCarthy, has demanded in a bizarre petition that the prosecutor Bragg undergo a political interrogation and deliver the documentation of the case to the deputies. Other conservative leaders have compared Biden to Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega on the grounds that the White House occupant wants to arrest his main political rival. More ammunition for conspiracy-loving Trumpism.
“A normal political party would have thrown a loser like Donald Trump under the bus by now. Instead, the Republicans choose to throw out the rule of law,” an article in the ‘Los Angeles Times’ rebuked on Wednesday. There are already those who say that the support of the right will be, for that same reason, like a siphon jet and it will go out sooner than expected; above all, when the competition for the primaries begins. Trump still has a powerful rise above the bases, but against him is playing the social and electoral risk of violent protests, the multiple investigations that surround him and the wear and tear of someone who left and would return to the presidential battle like a furious elephant in an antique store.
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