Trump's crazy year: Criminal accusations prepared him for the White House
Former President Donald Trump was experiencing the lowest point of his turbulent political career a year ago.
On November 15, 2022, Trump declared his intention to run for president again, and it appeared as though he would lose his grip on the party since Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was threatening to unsheathe his newly sharpened saber.
The GOP had just lost a majority in the Senate due to the hand-picked candidates of Trump, and he accepted responsibility for the Republicans’ poor performance in the House, even though they had overthrown Democrats.
By December, friends could see he was struggling to persuade donors to donate to the network of political organizations that were financing his campaign and legal defense, as he faced a future filled with high-stakes criminal and civil proceedings. Republicans who disagree with Trump believed they might smell blood in the water.
How much a year can change. Even if Trump has found these difficulties to be an annoyance, they have helped him politically, at least among Republicans. Each time he is the target of new legal action, Republicans, along with many of their elected representatives, support him. Thus, even if his property and freedom are in jeopardy, the trials have also advanced his chances of being the first Republican to secure three consecutive presidential nominations.
Senior adviser to the Trump campaign Susie Wiles declared, “I’m pleased, more than pleased, with where we are based on where I thought we would be a year ago,” before the president took the stage at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire, on December 15.
She claimed that her current source of insomnia is “complacency.”
The tiny group of advisors steering Trump’s campaign often highlight his trip to East Palestine, Ohio, in February as a critical political turning point in his quest to reclaim the White House. Trump vehemently lambasted President Joe Biden for not doing enough to assist locals in the vicinity of a train catastrophe that released hazardous chemicals.
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However, Republican voter public opinion surveys show that his greatest increase occurred in April, just after he was charged with paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels by a Manhattan grand jury. Prior to that, DeSantis was gaining ground on Trump without launching his own campaign, according to some state polls and national surveys.
Trump was ranked 44% in a nationwide Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in mid-March, followed by DeSantis at 30% and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley at 3%.
In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted by the first week of April, Trump was at 58%, DeSantis was at 21%, Haley was at 1%, and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy was at 1%. Trump now has a 37-point advantage over DeSantis, his closest rival, compared to just 14 points before.
Subsequently, Trump faced a federal indictment in Florida on allegations of unlawfully keeping sensitive records from his tenure in the White House. A federal court in Washington, D.C., has indicted him on counts about his attempts to void the outcomes of the 2020 election. Furthermore, he faces accusations in Georgia about his endeavors to reverse his defeat to Biden in that state.
There is nothing stopping a felon from winning the presidency, but it’s unclear whether any of the criminal matters will be resolved before the election of next year. If he is found guilty in any of them, he may face prison time.
In addition, a jury found Trump guilty of sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, who is pursuing a second case against him, and his corporation was fined in New York for operating a tax-fraud scheme. Additionally, Trump is involved in a civil fraud trial in the state. Civil suits related to the assault on the Capitol building on 6 January have been permitted to proceed by a federal appellate court, and Colorado’s highest court decided this month that he cannot run for office in the primary because judges found his actions following the 2020 election to be insurrection under the 14th Amendment.
For Trump’s team, Wiles referred to the deluge of criminal and civil procedures as a “scheduling nightmare”. However, politically speaking, they have shown to be a recurrent dream. Fundamentally, every new event deprives Trump’s opponents of the momentum needed to establish their brands with voters. More than that, though, Trump has made them pick sides, either supporting him or, in his unsupported claims, supporting a coordinated Biden-led scheme to have him tried and killed.
The former president’s supporters reacted angrily when DeSantis chastised him in March over the hush-money claims. That taught Trump’s opponents that even while his legal issues would cast doubt on his candidature in a general election, they would pay a price for criticizing him within the party.
nomination.
“Essentially, everything they’re doing is securing support for him in the primary, advancing him into the general election, and making the entire general election all about this legal stuff,” DeSantis stated the previous week.
It’s not just. DeSantis declared, “They’re abusing power, 100 percent.” “But the real question is, will that be successful? Unfortunately, I believe they have a plan that will work and allow Biden or the Democrat, whoever they are, to easily navigate this situation.
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Thus far, Trump’s Republican opponents have been unable to convince the majority of primary voters to abandon him. That’s partly because they haven’t been able to effectively defend DeSantis’s case, which is that if he is chosen, he will inevitably lose to Biden once more.
In a mid-November NBC News poll, Trump had a 58% to 18% nationwide lead over DeSantis, with Haley increasing to 13%. Only in New Hampshire does polling indicate that any other contender is practically certain to beat Trump; in two polls conducted in the state in December, Haley fell short of the Republican front-runner by roughly 15 points.
Perhaps even more remarkable, though, is how much support Trump would receive in a fictitious head-to-head with Biden. In June, an NBC survey of registered voters nationwide revealed Biden ahead of Trump by 4 points, 49% to 45%. Trump had a 2-point advantage in November, 46% to 44%. Swing state polls also point to a close race.
Some in the GOP who want to take a different course felt defeated by Trump’s dominance over his rivals in the Republican field in 2023 and the absence of proof that his nomination would bring the party to ruin in the general election.
At the Republican debate in Miami in November, a supporter of DeSantis remarked, “It feels like in July I’ll be wearing an f—ing MAGA hat.” “It appears to be inevitable.”
Despite party members’ concerns that the exact cause of the adversity could work against the candidate in a general election, this is not the first time it has helped a candidate win the primary.
A “flag-waving” campaign by then-Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, prevented President Jimmy Carter from facing a primary challenge when Iran captured American hostages in 1979. In the short term, Carter opened up a commanding 24-point lead over his leading Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, in the last months leading up to the 1980 election, as most Americans were satisfied with his handling of the issue. However, Reagan emerged victorious.
There are now two important distinctions: Trump’s difficulties stem from his own acts, and Carter was never in danger of being found guilty of a felony.
The Carter-Reagan case illustrates how unstable the political landscape may be. Certain Republicans have maintained time and again that if Trump becomes the nominee, their party is doomed.
Former governor of New Jersey Chris Christie stated in August on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that “we simply cannot expect that someone who is facing this number of criminal trials, and, quite frankly, the conduct that underlies those charges, can be a viable fall election candidate against Joe Biden.” This fall, Christie has presented the same argument to people nationwide on television and across New Hampshire, the state on which he has focused his campaign.
DeSantis and Christie may be correct, but they still haven’t persuaded Republican voters to reject Trump. Trump is, if anything, more powerful now than he was a year ago.
