Republicans rally to under-fire Trump

In downtown Elkhorn, Wisconsin, a city of 10,000 seated among dairy farms and fields of corn and soyabeans, the historic indictment of Donald Trump had done nothing to dampen the enthusiasm for the former president among volunteers staffing the Republican party county headquarters.

“Politics is a game, and it all gets dirty,” said Andrea Lazzeroni, one of the local Republicans. “Now all of a sudden they want to hold [Trump] up as the example of illegality. Well, he is nothing compared to what some of the other presidents have done.”

Trump carried rural Walworth County, 46 miles southwest of the Democratic bastion of Milwaukee, where Elkhorn is located, by 59 per cent in 2020. It is a world away from lower Manhattan, where the former president sat sombrely in court this week to face 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Trump has leaned on continued support from his conservative base in places such as Walworth County amid his latest legal travails, even as his fellow Republicans weigh the political implications of the unprecedented case, with proceedings set to drag into the 2024 presidential election season.

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Republican lawmakers roundly criticised Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, for bringing a case that many legal experts described as weak, saying it is more proof that the charges were politically motivated. Some conservatives who had grown disenchanted with Trump came to his defence – such as Mitt Romney and John Bolton – and criticised the prosecution in New York.

“I understand that this is the beginning of a legal process, not the end of one, but after an initial review of the details, this indictment looks like a political agenda run amok,” John Thune, the second-highest ranking Republican in the Senate, who has clashed with Trump in the past, told South Dakota Public Broadcasting on Wednesday.

Even Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which has publicly soured on Trump, displayed some support for the former president, with the front page of his New York Post tabloid declaring the charges to be “Trumped Up”. Millions of dollars of fundraising have also poured into the campaign’s coffers since the indictment.

This has given Trump some oxygen as he tries to defend himself in court and maintain his solid polling lead over Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and his most likely Republican rival for the White House next year.

“Maybe the case is stronger than is generally considered, but on the face of what we know now, these are the flimsiest of the legal challenges, criminal and civil, facing Trump. That does give him ammunition when he says this is all political,” Charlie Cook, the veteran US political commentator of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, wrote on Thursday.

There are signs that the case will energise Trump’s supporters and rally the party around him in the short term. However, there is a chance it will prove more damaging in the long run, particularly if any of the other criminal investigations into him result in additional charges.

“[The indictment] adds to the sense of chaos around Trump that would turn off potentially independent voters,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist.

Trump and his advisers will be weighing how the prosecutions will affect his ability to wage a campaign, even though there is no ban on convicted felons running for president in the US.

Perhaps the “greatest immediate threat” to Trump would be a gag order from the court that limited his ability to comment on the proceedings, according to Michael McConnell, law professor at Stanford Law School. The New York judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, said he was not inclined to issue one, but if that changes, such an order “would obviously crimp his style, and [would] generate numerous constitutional issues”, McConnell said.

Logistically, the prospect of navigating pretrial or trial proceedings could be a distraction to Trump’s campaign. “He may want to be in Iowa or he may want to be in New Jersey campaigning, but he may have to attend to the trial and other pretrial motions,” said Saikrishna Prakash, law professor at University of Virginia’s School of Law.

Trump’s indictment was not the only consequential political development this week in the US. Voters in Wisconsin handed a big win on Tuesday to the liberal candidate for its supreme court in a judicial election that was the most expensive in US history, shifting the bench’s balance of power to the left in a contest seen as a litmus test for the political mood.

“How does [the] Trump indictment impact politics in 2024? Well, in Wisconsin, it did not mobilise Trump backers to get to the polls to support the conservative candidate for state Supreme Court,” Amy Walter, the editor in chief of CPR, wrote on Twitter this week.

Some Wisconsin Republicans privately worry that Trump is costing the party votes it might otherwise win. The counties ringing Milwaukee are traditional Republican strongholds, but the party has lost ground there in the past decade.

While Lazzeroni and her fellow grassroots party volunteer Jennifer Holter do not always like Trump’s rhetoric, they say it will take a lot more for them than the criminal charges in New York to dump him. They credit him with placing conservative justices on the US Supreme Court, taking a hawkish national defence stance and championing the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.

To them, Trump’s actions pale in comparison to what they see as the Democrats’ offences. Lazzeroni pointed to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky; the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama, the first black president of the US, was not a US citizen; and the investigation into 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for having classified information on a private email server.

Holter said she would still volunteer for Trump if he won the Republican nomination next year. “True corruption would probably get my attention,” she said, but “I’d need to see the proof and not made-up stuff.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023