91 Felony Charges, but the GOP Base Doesn’t Want to Change Course

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

 

A rational Republican Party would look at former President Donald Trump’s fourth criminal indictment in five months — now up to a grand total of 91 felony charges — and pause to reevaluate its options in the 2024 presidential election. We don’t know exactly when all these trials will conclude, and when the juries will return their verdicts, but it is likely that at least one and perhaps several trials will be completed by Election Day 2024. Special counsel Jack Smith is aiming for a January 2024 start to the January 6 trial case, the Manhattan trial about the falsified business records over payments to Stormy Daniels starts in March 2024, and the classified documents case trial starts in May 2024. We don’t know yet when the Georgia trial would start.

 

It is also possible that more indictments come down because of these trials; Trump is jumping onto Truth Social and saying that witnesses should not testify, which may well violate federal law barring any effort to “harm, threaten, delay, or otherwise influence a witness to an official proceeding, punishable by up to 30 years imprisonment.” Trump doesn’t just have the bad habit of breaking the law; he does so in the most public, verifiable and obvious way possible.

 

When considering the combination of the evidence, the potential jury pools, and other factors, there is a good chance that if nominated for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump will be doing so as a convicted felon in November 2024.

 

This outcome would be, you know, bad. Whether you think Trump is getting fair trials that are the inevitable consequences of his actions, with the best defense lawyers his – er, his donors’ – money can buy, or whether you think he’s getting railroaded by ambitious prosecutors, biased jurors, and a sinister Deep State, earning the title “convicted felon” makes a person less likely to be elected President of the United States. Trump has never been a popular figure across the entire American electorate. (I know, I know, like the 2022 Republican nominee for Arizona Secretary of State Mark Finchem, you can’t find a single person in your state who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden, and this must be evidence that the whole election was stolen, and not that Biden voters don’t want to talk to you.) Right now, about 39 percent of Americans have a favorable feeling towards Trump, and 55.9 percent have an unfavorable feeling towards him.

 

Whether your preferred measuring stick is U.S. adults, registered voters, and likely voters – a majority of Americans don’t like Trump, they see January 6 as a national embarrassment, scandal, and disgrace, and they are unlikely to be persuaded that Trump is an innocent victim who broke no laws and who is being framed by malevolent prosecutors. Those who contended the 2020 presidential election was stolen lost just about every competitive race in the 2022 midterms; those who won were either well-known incumbents or in safely GOP states or districts. In the races for governor, secretary of state, and U.S. Senate, in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan and Nevada, voters heard the stolen election arguments and rejected the candidates making them.

 

It is exceptionally unlikely that sometime between now and November 2024, many Americans change their minds about Trump and conclude he’s the most unjustly persecuted American man since Richard Kimble.

 

All of this makes the election of Donald Trump in 2024 extremely improbable. It is not quite impossible; the 2016 election demonstrated that sometimes an underdog candidate can win just enough votes in just enough states to win 270 electoral votes while losing the national popular vote, and Joe Biden brings his own significant weaknesses to the race. Factors that neither campaign can control, like the economy or some foreign crisis, could make enough voters conclude that another four years of Biden is untenable. But the Republican Party would be foolish to bet all of its chips on that scenario, when there are other more options with much broader appeal. I know this is going to shock you, but every other GOP option hasn’t even been indicted once!

 

But, at least at this point, a majority of the Republican party has chosen to roll the dice on another nomination of Trump. Today’s Republican Party is not rational, and/or it does not really want to win the 2024 presidential election. It bewails the state of the country under President Biden, and then insists upon nominating the one man in America who has already lost an election to Biden. It contends the current erratic, rambling, irritable, habitually-lying 80-year-old is incapable of handling the duties of his office and then insists that an erratic, rambling, irritable 77-year-old is the only suitable replacement. The American people are extremely anxious about the cost of living and the state of the economy, and the GOP base is hell-bent on nominating a man who is likely to spend the next year and a half relitigating his 2020 loss and insisting that Venezuelan hackers and Chinese bamboo in the ballot paper in Arizona are proof the election is stolen. When voters tune in to the 2024 general election, looking for relief from high grocery prices, high gas prices, high mortgage and interest rates, Trump is likely to still be insisting that he won key states last cycle; this morning Trump is promising a  “Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia is almost complete.”

 

It is as if slightly more than half the Republican party wants to lose the 2024 presidential election, with all of the likely consequences for the down-ticket races.