Donald Trump will make his most concerted effort yet to turn his criminal trial into a political asset over the next two days, moving from the courtroom to the campaign trail and back again.
The former president’s bribery trial resumes in New York on Tuesday (30), as prosecutors seek to prove that Trump falsified business records to cover up an alleged extramarital affair and thus interfered in the 2016 elections by misleading voters. voters.
They are unwilling to reveal witnesses in advance in order to protect them from Trump’s attacks. But they are expected to move forward with questioning a former banker of Michael Cohen, a former Trump lawyer and fixer who made bribe payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an affair with Trump, which he denies. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
With the end of the day on Wednesday (1st), the presumptive Republican Party candidate will fly to the epicenter of his confrontation with President Joe Biden, making stops in two decisive states, Wisconsin and Michigan, which could decide the fate of the House White. The trip will show how useful it is for an indicted candidate to have their own plane.
But most significantly, this will be Trump’s most intense campaign trip in recent weeks, and he will certainly deepen his false claims that his four indictments were directly instigated by the White House.
However, Trump’s return to full-time campaigning will be temporary. He is due back in court on Thursday (2) – when Judge Juan Merchan will hold another hearing into the prosecution’s allegations that he regularly violates a partial gag order intended to protect witnesses, court staff and even the judge’s own family.
The juxtaposition between the campaign – where Trump will return to his domineering political persona – and his mute loss of power in the courtroom, where the judge is in charge, will be another notable moment in a presidential election campaign like no other.
It will emphasize how the 2024 White House race has so far been shaped both by what happens in the courts and in traditional campaigns. And it will underscore how Trump has made his defense in several criminal cases the same central theme of his campaign — that he is effectively a political dissident who is the victim of unwarranted persecution.
The presumptive Republican nominee tells his supporters that he is being targeted because he is preventing the same thing from happening to them. “I am your justice, and to those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year.
Prejudicial testimony
The opening week of the prosecution’s case contained detailed testimony that appeared to be damaging to Trump, as former tabloid editor David Pecker detailed the “capture and kill” schemes the former president allegedly used to suppress negative stories and lawyers revealed evidence about alleged financial irregularities.
“It was electoral fraud. Plain and simple,” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said in his opening statement. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche countered: “I have a spoiler alert. There is nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. This is called democracy.”
It is too early to say how the electorate might react to a conviction in the case or whether Trump might get a political boost if he is acquitted. The lesson of the Trump era, however, is that the former president’s supporters often see attempts to hold him legally accountable as an example of unfair victimization.
A survey of the CNN released last week suggests that there is no dominant public opinion on the trial, but this does not exclude the possibility that a guilty verdict could harm the former president. Only 44% of Americans expressed confidence that the jury will reach a fair verdict.
Not surprisingly, most Democrats feel Trump is being treated more leniently than others, while most Republicans feel otherwise. One area of potential concern for Trump, however, is that 24% of his supporters say a conviction could lead them to reconsider their support — although the overwhelming majority say they would not vote for Biden.
Facing the Battle Against Biden in Swing States
Trump’s appearances in Wisconsin and Michigan will give him a more traditional platform than the grim courtroom hallway where he has delivered daily speeches against the case and spread a dystopian vision of a nation on the brink of collapse. But there is also a risk that Trump’s loose tongue on the campaign trail could cause him problems following his alleged violations of Merchan’s gag order.
The former president has complained that he is cornered in court and unable to run an effective campaign. “I’m not in Georgia, or Florida, or North Carolina, campaigning like I should. This is election interference,” he said earlier this month.
But he spent the day off from trial on Wednesday playing golf at his course in Bedminster, New Jersey, the news agency said. CNN. Still, the four-day-a-week court schedule has its limitations. Trump, for example, has not yet rescheduled a rally that was supposed to take place on April 20 in North Carolina but was canceled due to a storm.
Meanwhile, Trump’s allies are promoting the persecution issue. “I think all these trials are political. I think it’s a selection process. I think what’s happening in New York is an outrage,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CNN on Sunday (28).
This view ignores the fact that all the indictments arose from grand juries and in accordance with established legal procedure and that some of Trump’s alleged crimes strike at the heart of America’s fundamental political system. But such rhetoric is convincing to Trump supporters and is repeated daily in conservative media in order to disguise the nature of the accusations.
Trump’s itinerary on Wednesday reflects the critical importance of two states he won in 2016 but lost to Biden upon leaving the White House in 2020. Polls published by CBS News on Sunday showed the rivals neck and neck in Wisconsin and Michigan . They were also tied in Pennsylvania, a third swing state that Biden took from Trump four years ago.
The president’s hopes for a second term likely depend on him winning at least two of the three states and obtaining 270 electoral votes. Biden made several campaign stops while the former president was imprisoned in New York.
The Trump campaign is billing the presumptive Republican nominee’s trip to Waukesha, Wisconsin, as an opportunity to highlight “the peace, prosperity and security of his first term under Joe Biden’s failed presidency.” That might seem like a hard case to make for a twice-impeached former president who tried to crush U.S. democracy to remain in office.
However, new research from CNN released on Sunday suggests that Trump’s message may be resonating with some voters at a time of high food prices, high interest rates and turmoil abroad.
About 55% of Americans now consider the former president’s tenure a success, while 61% think Biden’s presidency is a failure, according to the poll. Biden’s ratings are especially weak on the economy, immigration and his handling of Israel’s war in Gaza against Hamas, an issue that is especially important to voters under 35, a sector key to the Democratic coalition.
The former president and his allies are already taking advantage of nationwide pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses to embellish their claims for a nation under siege by left-wing extremists under Biden.
Although protests typically include only a minority of students on each campus and have not had anywhere near the momentum of the Vietnam War or civil rights era demonstrations, images of police confronting students at protests contain emotive images that can be used selectively. in the kind of demagogic campaign that Trump is running.
Any sense of political unrest among voters could draw some of them to his warnings that America needs tough, strong leadership. The former president said last week that the current campus protests have made the 2017 rally by white extremists in Charlottesville, Virginia — in which a woman died — seem like “nothing.”
But the campus protests were mostly peaceful — unlike the mob of Trump supporters that came to Washington and stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The campus demonstrations have divided the Democratic Party in half — a divide that House Speaker Mike Johnson sought to widen last week, traveling to Columbia University and calling for the deployment of the National Guard to disperse the demonstrations.
His decision to seize on the issue highlighted the way campaigns construct narratives that may not be completely true, but which can be politically potent if they influence the perceptions that voters are already forming. Trump is following a similar playbook by merging his criminal defense as an alleged victim of partisan persecution with his political offensive for a return to the White House.
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