It’s Time for Republicans to Come to Terms with Trump’s Legal Peril

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

 

When it comes to analysis of Donald Trump’s growing legal liabilities, the conservative press has succumbed to something resembling a state of denial.

 

In right-leaning media venues, the focus is on the cosmic unfairness of it all. They lament the degree to which prosecutors have stretched the statutes to ensnare the former president. They mourn the precedents that are being set. They fear the prospect of criminalizing otherwise-banal political conduct. And they fret over the Pandora’s Box that we risk opening.

 

These are not invalid concerns, but they obscure for consumers of center-right media a clearer understanding of what is about to happen to Donald Trump and, by extension, the voters who would entrust him with another term in the White House.

 

An amusing example of the avoidance to which pundits on the right are prone comes to us via Newsmax. On Monday night, the network’s guests were asked to discuss the latest indictment of Trump and 18 of his associates in Georgia, where jurors will be confronted with evidence that the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the state; made false statements; forged and filed false documents; harassed, intimidated, and impersonated public officials; influenced or attempted to influence the testimony of witnesses; tampered with voting machines; and even plotted to steal voting-system data.

 

Among the guests was one-time Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris, who insisted that Trump will be elected the 47th president of the United States, but he will win election from behind bars. “He’s gonna be convicted,” Morris said. “And he’s gonna go to prison.”

 

Morris’s interlocutors seemed dumbfounded by the stark language he used to describe the sequence of events that tends to follow a criminal conviction. Everyone else involved quickly scurried away from Morris’s conclusion, but the moment was notable as a brief but blinding flash of clarity. It stands out as a rare example of center-right opinion makers grappling with the political circumstances with which they are now confronted. For Trump and those who hope to see him retake the White House, those circumstances are bleak.

 

Trump will spend the months leading up to the 2024 general election in and out of courtrooms. He is due in court to argue against a civil fraud accusation and a defamation case on January 15 and January 29, 2024, respectively. On May 20, 2024, he will be in Florida defending himself against the criminal allegation that he mishandled classified documents and misled investigators. Special counsel Jack Smith seeks a January 2, 2024, trial date for the case involving the former president’s conduct leading up to and culminating in the events of January 6, 2021. Arguments against Trump in Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s case are set to begin on March 25 of next year, and Fulton County DA Fanni Willis wants her prosecution of the former president to begin “in the next six months.”

 

Even assuming some of these dates could still be postponed, they are unlikely to all be pushed beyond the presidential election. And they will dominate the nation’s headlines during the campaign. Voters will be bombarded with evidence presented at trial, the oral arguments attorneys make on behalf of the state and the defendant, and reporters’ assessments of how judges and jurors alike responded to the day’s testimony. Trump’s distinct legal woes will congeal in voters’ minds into one undifferentiated procedural drama, and Americans love a good procedural drama. They and the press will follow every minute of it to the exclusion of the issues on which Americans might otherwise vote in 2024.

 

Even before Trump finds himself in the dock, he and his attorneys will be compelled to devote most of their attention and resources to his legal defenses. Trump’s campaign donors are already contributing to what has functionally become a legal-defense fund. Those are resources that will not go to campaign advertising, canvassing, get-out-the-vote efforts, or dozens of other best practices to which winning campaigns adhere. The former president himself has warned his supporters that his legal calendar will take him away from the campaign trail for considerable periods of time. But Trump will never be far from voters’ minds. He will be ever-present, looming angrily on their television screens in grainy courtroom sketches.

 

Renominating Trump as the Republican candidate for president will all but ensure that the 2024 general election becomes a proxy argument over the validity of his claims regarding 2020 election malfeasance and the legitimacy of the criminal charges he faces in relation to his conduct shortly after his loss. Republican elected officials, GOP committees, and their independent allies will have to devote considerable resources to conditioning the public into believing something it presently doesn’t: that the charges he faces are unserious and politically motivated. That will be a heavy lift.

 

According to the early August ABC News/Ipsos poll, 65 percent of American adults believe the charges Trump faces in relation to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election are “serious,” while just 24 percent disagree. Sixty-one percent of respondents to a June ABC News/Ipsos survey said the Mar-a-Lago documents case is “serious” compared to 28 percent who dismissed the severity of the charges. These impressions will be tough to combat, but Republicans will have no choice but to try, if only to keep Republican enthusiasm high. How else are they to stave off the damage a Trump nomination can do to GOP candidates farther down the ballot?

 

What is most important for Republican voters to understand is that much of this is, at this stage, unavoidable. Donald Trump will spend much of the next year in and out of courtrooms. The press will treat his ordeal as a substitute for campaign events in the absence of actual campaign events. The notion that, barring some earth-shattering development, Hunter Biden’s legal jeopardy and Joe Biden’s peripheral involvement in his son’s schemes will neutralize Trump’s legal exposure as a political issue is more a hope than a plan. Republican politicos who might be inclined to convince themselves that voters will subordinate their concerns about Trump and his movement to their dissatisfaction with the economy will have to contend with the fact that they didn’t do that in 2022.

 

Trump is already an all-consuming presence in American life, and we haven’t seen anything yet. His criminal trials will be the media event of this century, and any election in which he is a candidate will devolve into an up-or-down referendum on the allegations against him. Republicans need to reckon with this reality, and the sooner, the better.