“Our justice system is becoming illegal,” declared the Former United States President Donald Trump before a group of supporters at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida hours after being indicted by a Manhattan grand jury.
It was his vehement defense after being charged with 34 criminal counts for buying the silence of Stormy Daniels — a porn model with whom he had an affair — so she wouldn’t tell the story to a magazine on the eve of the 2016 presidential campaign that landed him in the White House.
“They have been using the judicial system for anything, and now they are using it to win elections,” Trump said during that rally on the night of April 4. It was nothing more than the reiteration of dozens of messages published by him on his Twitter account during the weeks that preceded the indictment by Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg.
tracked in a new campaign for the presidential elections of November 2024, Trump believed he had, thanks to his indictment, a golden opportunity to attract the attention of American voters to his figure and appear as the victim of a persecution led by “Marxist and Bolshevik” forces supported, according to the Trumpists, by President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party.
(Also read: What Trump gains and loses after imputing 34 charges against him)
The former president gave a speech in which he stated that his case is unfounded and that he intends to affect the 2024 election.
At first, many political and opinion leaders made the same bet. The few Republican congressmen who had chosen to keep a prudent distance from the former president after the violent takeover of the Capitol in January 2020 by a gang of Trump supporters, this time came out to support him. They attacked prosecutor Bragg and the Democrats and they sided with Trump’s argument of a judicial system “infiltrated by leftists” who seek to prevent him from returning to the Presidency.
But, in addition, numerous media outlets and analysts—usually Trump critics—questioned the strength of prosecutor Bragg’s case, as well as the risk posed to democracy by a district attorney can prosecute a former president, something that has never happened in two and a half centuries of Republican life.
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Trump is capable, with an incendiary trill or an impromptu speech, of capturing the attention of reporters
The weekly The Economist, which had harshly censured Trump’s actions during the Capitol takeover and considered it a threat against democracy in the United States and “the rest of the West”, criticized the case presented by Bragg. “If Trump is going to be prosecuted, it must be for something that cannot be dismissed as a technicality,” the publication said in late March.
For its part, Time magazine, which also questioned the former president dozens of times, warned in an article on April 4 that this type of judicial process “targeting Trump can offer him a clean route to mobilize (his followers)” and return to the White House.
More of the same
At first, different polls released a few days after Trump’s presentation in a Manhattan court where he pleaded not guilty to the charges aimed to confirm that he was going to win. Despite the criminal entanglement, Trump and his strategists congratulated each other because the media attention was once again focused on the figure of the former president.
As columnist David Byler said at the beginning of December in The Washington Post, “Trump is capable, with an incendiary trill or an impromptu speech, of grabbing the attention of reporters (…) and leading them to cover the topic he chooses.” To that extent, the process opened in Manhattan was more of the same: high-octane gasoline for his campaign.
(You can read: Secret payments to a doorman and a former Playboy bunny: the cases that dot Trump)
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The open process in Manhattan was more of the same: high-octane gasoline for the Trump presidential campaign.
Before he can assume the Republican nomination for a second time, Trump must defeat opponents from his own party in the long schedule of primary elections that begins in 11 months. For that competition, the former president entered the year with a narrow lead over his main challenger, the very conservative governor of Florida, Ron De-Santis.
In the average of several polls published between January and February, Trump got about 38 percent of Republican voting intentions, while DeSantis had 33 percent. The governor had been advancing in the polls during the second semester of 2022, even without having formalized his aspiration.
But after Trump’s impeachment, the majority of Republican voters rushed to support him. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll then gave Trump 57 percent of voting intentions to 31 percent for DeSantis. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll, the lead was larger: Trump, 58 percent; DeSantis, 21 percent.
As Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s former labor secretary, said in a column in the British Guardian newspaper on April 11, “Trump’s high-decibel howls of anger and complaint, and his scathing accusation of a ‘Deep State’ aligned against him, they are rallying the Republicans to their side.”
(Also: ‘The case was made to interfere in the 2024 election’: Trump after impeachment)
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After Trump’s impeachment, the majority of Republican voters rushed to support Trump, thus declining support for Desantis.
And the independents?
But Reich himself downplayed the political advantage that the process could give the former president and thus departed from a certain consensus among Trump’s friends and critics that suggested that, beyond the judicial challenge implied by prosecutor Bragg’s accusation, the former president was obtaining political gains from the situation.
For Reich, “the impact (of the impeachment) is not increasing the chances that Trump will be elected president in 2024 and, conversely, those options are shrinking.”
First, because the voters who declare themselves Republicans – which is among those who Trump improved his numbers – are only 28 percent of the possible voters. To win in 2016, Trump did not count on them alone, but added to his cause a wide swath of independents fed up with the so-called “Washington establishment” that they saw represented in Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate.
(Keep reading: The other legal fronts facing former President Donald Trump in the US)
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To return to the White House, the former president requires the vote of the independents.
Voters who call themselves independent represent 40 percent of the potential electorate and without a good slice of that broad sector of opinion it is not possible to win the Presidency. In 2020, 52 percent of independents voted for incumbent President Joe Biden versus just 37 percent who voted for Trump. And that was final.
The assault on the Capitol and the different judicial problems that Trump faces and that have exposed a certain disdain for the law by the ex-president throughout decades of business and political career they have driven away many independents.
In the first week of April, days after the indictment, a survey contracted by the CNN network with the SSRS firm brought two very disturbing data for the ex-president. The first, that 60 percent of Americans agree with the Manhattan court’s accusation. And the second, that among the independents, 62 percent support the prosecution, against 38 percent who reject it.
Other polls confirmed the trend. According to Ipsos, unfavorable opinions against Trump among respondents as a whole, which before the impeachment numbered 55 percent, rose to 61 percent, while favorable opinions fell from 29 to 25 percent. Biden, Trump’s potential opponent next year, isn’t very popular, but he’s still doing better than the former president: 48 percent unfavorable opinions against 34 percent favorable opinions.
(More news: These are the four protagonists of the imputation to Donald Trump)
If a growing majority of Americans say Trump should call off his campaign, that will eventually show up at the polls.
Even more serious for Trump is that more than half of those polled in an ABC poll believe he should suspend his campaign activities having been criminally prosecuted, a figure 8 points higher than that registered a few days before the accusation.
From a legal point of view, nothing prevents him from being a candidate if he is charged, as long as there is not at least a firm conviction. But if a growing majority of Americans say Trump should call off his campaign, that will eventually show up at the polls next year.
Especially since the case of payment for the silence of Stormy Daniels is not the only judicial process that the ex-president faces. In a way, it is the least complicated, since even if he were convicted, it is very likely that he could serve the sentence outside of prison.
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Former US President Donald Trump walks into the New York Criminal Courtroom in New York.
EFE/EPA/JUSTIN LANE
But Trump faces half a dozen more sensitive causes. The most complex has to do with his actions as president, about to leave the White House, when the violent assault of his followers on the Capitol took place. The case is handled by a special prosecutor, after the robust report made by a commission of the House of Representatives.
Another case involves at least 15 boxes of classified documents that, irregularly and in apparent violation of the national archives law, Trump took from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago home, and which were discovered following an FBI raid on said residence.
In another process, Fanny Willis, attorney for the district of Fulton in Georgia, is investigating the role of Trump and his team in the efforts and pressures to illegally annul the electoral result of the 2020 presidential elections in Georgia, where Trump lost the vote.
(Also read: Why sentence against Trump would put Biden and other presidents in check?)
“This is a criminal investigation, we are not playing a game,” Willis, a prosecutor, recently told a CNN reporter. In Michigan there is another similar process. To all of the above are added several cases for financial crimes related to the businesses of the Trump organization.
If the criminally less serious case —that of the model Daniels—has hit so hard and in a few weeks the image of Trump among voters, it is easy to imagine the deterioration that could suffer if another process reaches the hands of a grand jury and the grand jury gives way to a criminal indictment. Although in politics there are no corpses, the truth is that, if it happens, the former president trump would be about to become one.
MAURICIO VARGAS LINARES
WEATHER ANALYST
[email protected]
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