The unprecedented indictment and arrest of former U.S. president Donald Trump may provide a short-term boost to his re-election campaign, political watchers say, giving him the attention to potentially dominate the Republican field.
But the notoriety he gains from the criminal charges against him in New York may also make him unappealing to the moderate and independent voters he needs to win over once again in order to return to the White House next year, those experts say.
“He will sort of push all of the other contenders out of the media sphere and suck up all of the oxygen,” said Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University and the director of the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy.
“So in the short term, it helps him. But in the long term, it simply reinforces (among key voters) that he comes with liabilities, that he doesn’t necessarily respect the law. And I think there will be other indictments.”
Trump was arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday afternoon on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have said they plan to file a motion to dismiss the charges.
He has denied any wrongdoing and claims the alleged sexual affairs with adult film actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal in 2006 never happened.
Those affairs and the six-figure payments made to both women during the 2016 campaign to suppress their stories — one of which was facilitated by Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who claims he was repaid by Trump through his business — form the backbone of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case.
The multiple payments allegedly made to Cohen to reimburse him for the Daniels payment are each treated as separate felony counts in the indictment unsealed Tuesday.
No other U.S. president has been indicted on criminal charges before, a fact that Trump — who has been impeached twice and attempted to overturn his election loss in 2020 — is trying to turn to his political benefit. He remains the presumptive frontrunner in the race to boot President Joe Biden from the White House.
Since reports of Trump’s indictment emerged last week, his aides say the campaign has raised US$7 million from supportive donors, but official figures have not yet been released. Trump has predicted the move will “backfire” on Biden, who is not involved in a local prosecution.
Polling has been mixed on how Americans feel about the indictment. An Ipsos/ABC News survey conducted immediately after news of the indictment broke on Thursday suggests half the country believes the charges against Trump are serious, and 45 per cent believe he should be charged with a crime, compared with 32 per cent who disagreed. Yet 60 per cent of Americans polled by CNN around the same time said they approved of the decision to indict Trump.
Those polls and others have seen opinions fall along party lines, with most Republicans decrying the indictment and claiming it is politically motivated. Prosecutors for Bragg, a Democrat, have dismissed those claims.
The episode has, however briefly, rallied Republicans behind Trump once again.
The party began moving away from the former president after last November’s midterms, which saw most Trump-backed candidates lose their races, while Republicans failed to win back the Senate and gained a narrower majority in the House of Representatives than expected.
Trump’s re-election announcement soon after was met with shrugs from conservative media outlets, like Fox News, which had stopped booking him on its airwaves.
In recent days, Republicans have united to criticize Bragg and accuse him of political prosecution — including potential opponents in the Republican presidential primary, like former vice-president Mike Pence, who broke with Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Schiller believes presidential hopefuls are missing an opportunity by not using Trump’s indictment to their own advantage.
“If you’re Ron DeSantis … and you seem to be the person everyone’s talking about as the alternative to Trump without the baggage, the time for you to step up and step in is now, not to wait a couple of weeks or a couple of months,” she said.
“All that time, Trump will be soaking up all the oxygen and consuming all of the free media. And I think he might develop a lead that is insurmountable, unless somebody like DeSantis gets in soon.”
Matthew Lebo, a professor and chair of the political science department at Western University, believes Republicans are still looking for an alternative candidate even as they protest against Trump’s indictment.
“There will be lots of people in the elite of the Republican Party that (this) just makes them want to move on from him that much more, and they’ll be trying to find their candidate,” he said.
That’s because Trump remains unpopular as a general election candidate, a position analysts say won’t be helped by his legal woes.
The CNN poll found just 34 per cent of voters approve of Trump, which has remained steady since January. That’s consistent with polling from Quinnipiac, which also found nearly 60 per cent of Americans believe criminal charges should disqualify Trump from running for president again.
Quinnipiac’s polling also suggests Trump would narrowly lose a rematch against Biden next year if he becomes the Republican candidate. Yet a large majority of Republicans surveyed said they still support Trump and his candidacy.
“There’s nothing that’s going to make him unpopular (among Republicans),” Lebo said. “There’s nothing that’s going to make it so that he would lose the election to a Democrat 70-30.
“But he is still probably a losing candidate whether this was happening or not.”
Schiller points out that Trump’s behaviour while he was in the White House — culminating with the Jan. 6 attack — helped turn off the suburban Republican and independent voters in key swing states who helped elect him in 2016. A felony indictment is unlikely to sway them back to his tent, she added.
Trump faces other potential legal perils. The district attorney in Atlanta has for two years been investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to meddle in Georgia’s 2020 vote count, and has said charges in that case are “imminent.” And a U.S. Justice Department special counsel is investigating Trump’s storage of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and his efforts to reverse his election loss.
Whether or not further indictments arise from those investigations, Schiller says holding Trump accountable is important regardless of the political implications.
“Nobody is above the law,” she said.
— with files from Global’s Reggie Cecchini