Donald Trump is back where he most aspires to be — in the headlines, to the satisfaction of those who relish the idea of the destructive Shrek facing indictment for alleged sleazy behaviour and cover-up. The Republican leadership and Trumpian base, meanwhile, obsess with equal vigour about a plot to use the law against a former president. Tonight, Trump faces arrested and a call to court in lower Manhattan, where he will plead not guilty.
Two compelling but flawed narratives collide and entangle with each other. The first that Trump is so guilty of malfeasance for his role in dangerously deepening divisions in the US and the wider world that a reckoning is overdue and justice will have its day. The second is he is the victim of a witchhunt — a liberal Salem, manipulated to push him out of contention at the next election.
If this feels familiar, it is because this has broadly been the story since the frayed two-party system broke on the rocks of Trump’s entry into the White House in 2016 on a wave of discontent fuelled by a cynically adept campaign. The Stormy Daniels suit — an alleged pay-off by Trump to a porn star who claims to have had an earlier affair with him (which he denies) — is a bridgehead into a wider investigation of murky personal and campaign finances.
More allegations, charges and counter-accusations will follow on the more serious grounds of the former President’s role in whipping up the violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in the sourness of election defeat, a separate accusation of interference with election results in Georgia and the convoluted saga of why the President retained sensitive documents in his Florida home after leaving office.
The Trump claim will be that the legal system is biased against him (and around half of Americans agree with this default mode). The technicalities of opaque campaign finance arrangements and the fact that they are usually treated with a light touch by the courts (infringements dealt with by fines rather than prison and often deemed “misdemeanours”, which would count as a win for the Trump camp.
However this unfolds, the impact of playing the former president in the dock will resonate though the nominations battles for the 2024 White House race, the opening shots of which are being fired this week. Legal cases and political horizons do not conveniently align, however, and Trump (who took both campaign and legal advisors with him on the flight to New York this week), may well be able to run for office while the cases against him are spun out.
That leaves a relatively high chance that Trump will be the Republican contender. Ron DeSantis, his main rival, has struggled to cut through with a pitch to be the cleaner, modernised version of a populist worldview. My odds would still be on Trump winning the nomination, not least on the grounds that Republicans fear inviting the wrath of a vengeful figure who would more likely campaign against the winner than accept defeat.
On the other side of the aisle the fog is lifting too. Barring a dramatic worsening of health, Joe Biden looks set to be the Democrats’ nominee for a second term. And yes, he is old, and as one of his close friends in politics put it to me, “he has always had a problem with words”, which results in blunders like confusing Iran and Ukraine in the State of the Union address.
But the pragmatic truth of the donkey-Derby route to the Oval Office is that it is fearsomely hard to challenge those who have built a base and incumbency is a powerful tool. Last year, the search was on for an alternative to revive the Democrats at the centre. This year, it somehow isn’t. A combination of tactical successes like the Inflation Reduction Act, which pledges “America first” jobs while making some inroads into tackling climate change, has solidified Biden’s grip across the centre and becalmed challenges on the Left.
The Ukraine war has provided a foreign crisis serious enough to raise the President’s profile on foreign affairs and deter challengers.
The prediction of one of the most far-sighted Democrats in Congress who I asked a while back to predict the next race was simply, “the same two elderly white guys duke-ing it out”. For one of them, the unscheduled ad slot this week is a courtroom. And as any legal drama fan knows, that is also a stage with a large spotlight on it.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of Politico
