Mutually Assured Re-Nomination

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, July 20, 2023

 

There’s being fortunate in your enemies, and then there’s having enemies who are helping you take the first step in your political comeback. 

 

Donald Trump and his adversaries want profoundly different things in the long run — Trump wants to be back in the White House; Democrats want him in jail. 

 

Yet, in the medium term, they both are seeking the same thing — Trump as the Republican nominee.

 

The serial indictments of Trump, even if it’s not their primary purpose, advance this mutual interest. Unless the current dynamic changes, Trump will get indicted again, and will again dominate media attention, and again rally Republicans to his cause based on charges of selective prosecution. 

 

The routine is so predictable, it’s become boring. 

 

It was just a taste of what a third indictment will bring that the highly touted Ron DeSantis interview with Jake Tapper on CNN didn’t even lead the show because Trump had shared the news that he’d gotten a target letter. 

 

The pushback against the notion that Trump’s prosecutorial pursuers know that they are helping Trump is that it’s too clever by half, that Trump has these legal vulnerabilities and is simply paying the price. No theories about underhanded political motivation are necessary.

 

It’s certainly true that Trump had major exposure in the documents case, but the Alvin Bragg indictment is gossamer-thin and we don’t know yet what Special Counsel Jack Smith has next or what Fani Willis is working with in Fulton County, Ga. 

 

Consider this thought experiment: If the Justice Department and the other prosecutors knew that the indictments guaranteed a Ron DeSantis or Tim Scott nomination, would they still go through with them? If they thought they made Trump a stronger general-election candidate and the favorite to beat Joe Biden, would they still pull the trigger? Or would they find some reason for forbearance, when there’s plenty to be said for forbearance in the first place? 

 

It doesn’t require a fine-grained understanding of Republican politics to understand what’s going on. Certainly, after the GOP reaction to the Mar-a-Lago search, it was obvious that targeting Trump would benefit him. And if there were any doubt, the Trump polling surge after the Bragg indictment should have removed it. 

 

Still, Trump’s pursuers have persisted, with two more indictments almost certainly on the way. 

 

For Trump, the worse, the better — the more he’s indicted and the weaker the cases, the more he’s helped in the nomination fight.  

 

For Trump’s adversaries, quantity trumps quality; everyone gets a piece of him, and it increases the odds that at least a trial or two will happen before the November 2024 election. 

 

If the indictments help Trump in the primaries, they hurt him in the general, and trials and guilty verdicts would presumably hurt even more. 

 

Again, if Trump’s prosecutors believed that rushing to trial would somehow boost Trump against Biden, it’s hard to see them being so desperate to get him in courtrooms as soon as possible. 

 

Even if it’s helping him politically for now, Trump doesn’t like getting indicted. His denunciations of “these vicious Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Democrats,” “THESE LUNATICS AND THUGS” who are after him are wholly sincere. But without the vicious Communists et al., he might well be ten points lower in the polls, and anything that makes the primary race look more competitive is quite bad for him.

 

The legal handiwork of the LUNATICS AND THUGS is one of the former president’s most valuable political assets. 

 

Trump and his enemies may despise one other, but they are working toward the same immediate political goal, i.e., a high-stakes, hate-filled, Third World–ish Trump–Biden rematch with the possibility of jail for one of the contenders if he loses and intense prosecutorial scrutiny for the other if he loses.  

 

And everything so far indicates that they’re going to get it.