The guilty verdict handed down against former President Trump is bringing moderate Republicans and longtime Trump skeptics to his side in a way the Trump campaign has failed to do for months.
Longtime Trump critics, including Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), among others, are rallying to Trump’s defense following the verdict — and others Republicans wary of Trump, like Nikki Haley, are expected to do so as well.
Haley, who said last week that she would vote for Trump over President Biden, has so far remained silent on Trump’s conviction, but prominent Republicans, even some of his biggest critics, say the case brought by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg (D), was fundamentally unfair.
McConnell said that after the verdict the “charges should never have been brought” and predicted that the conviction will be overturned on appeal.
And Collins said Bragg blurred “the lines between the judicial system and the electoral system” by running for the district attorney’s office with a promise to prosecute Trump.
“This decision has the same dramatic effect across the country as the impeachment of President Clinton. These are very different scenarios, but both have had a huge recovery effect. With Clinton it was the Democrats, and now with Trump it’s the Republicans who believe there is judicial overreach,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and former senior leadership advisor for the Senate and House.
Bonjean said McConnell’s surprising defense of Trump is a signal to other mainstream and traditional Republicans to unite behind the former president.
“He’s giving establishment Republicans permission to support Trump’s entry in November,” he said.
Senate Republicans, in particular, recognize that their hopes of regaining the majority depend on Trump’s performance in swing states. This leaves them little choice but to close ranks as Trump faces possible prison time when he is scheduled to be sentenced just before the Republican Party’s nominating convention in mid-July.
Bonjean said McConnell’s show of support for Trump is “ensuring that Republican challengers in swing states are fully supported from the start of the ticket with Trump.”
Even Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, who refused to support Trump, called the verdict an “outrage.”
“Former President Trump’s conviction on politically motivated charges is an outrage and a disservice to the nation,” he told Fox News Digital.
“No one is above the law, but our courts should not become a tool to be used against political opponents,” he said, echoing talking points used by Trump allies alleging “weaponization” of the Justice Department .
Republican Party strategist Ford O’Connell said the verdict “will have a unifying effect on the party.”
“You can do two things simultaneously, say, ‘Hey, I’m not a big fan of Trump, but at the same time this is completely wrong,’” he said.
O’Connell said the more than $30 million Trump’s campaign raised after the verdict was announced “is a good indicator of the unifying effect it would have on what we call base Republican voters, regular Republican voters.”
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of voters in six swing states found that 49 percent of respondents did not think Trump would get a fair trial in New York, while 45 percent thought he would.
One NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist a poll conducted before the verdict was released and published on Thursday showed that 25 percent of Republican respondents said they would be more likely to vote for Trump if a jury found him guilty.
The same poll found that 67 percent of voters surveyed across the country said they would not vote differently in November if Trump were found guilty.
Republican senators predicted before the verdict that a guilty ruling could energize Republican voters who support Trump and put Democrats on the defensive.
“He could win in a landslide,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said last month about the political impact of a guilty verdict on Trump’s general election chances. “It looks so horrible.”
Paul noted that New York’s statute of limitations expired due to Trump’s falsification of business records, which forced Bragg to combine them with campaign finance violations to move his case forward.
Trump’s campaign announced that it raised $34.8 million in the first six hours after the jury announced its guilty verdict.
Trump pollster Jim McLaughlin said Trump skeptics like McConnell, Collins and Pence are rallying behind the former president because they are genuinely offended by the conviction about conduct that the general public has known about for years.
“What’s happened is people have realized that this is wrong, it’s totally wrong,” he said, citing legal scholars such as Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz, who were highly critical of Bragg’s case.
Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, predicted on social media that the conviction would be reversed upon appeal.
And Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor emeritus, warned Friday on Fox News that Trump’s conviction would begin “a war of weaponizing the criminal justice system.”
McLaughlin downplayed the significant share of Republican primary votes against Trump in states like Indiana and Nebraska that were cast after Haley dropped out of the presidential race in early March.
“I think this is all overrated. I’m not really worried about ‘Nikki Haley’ voters. Look at all the research that came out before all of this. Trump is getting over 90% of the Republican vote, and one of the reasons he is doing so well is because he gets more from his Republican supporters than Biden does from his Democrats,” he said. “He has his Republican base blocked. He gets more than 90% of the Republican vote.
Some Republican senators acknowledge, however, that a criminal conviction could further alienate independent voters, especially college-educated and suburban women who turned away from Trump and the Republican Party in the 2020 presidential election and 2022 midterm elections.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who said in March that she could not support Trump for president, said Friday that the party would have a better chance of winning back the White House with another candidate.
“A Republican candidate without this baggage would have a clear path to victory,” she posted on social media platform X.
Murkowski said it was a “shame” that the presidential election “focused on personalities and legal issues rather than a debate about policies that would lift up Americans.”
“These distractions gave the Biden campaign a free pass as the focus shifted from Biden’s indefensible record and the damage his policies have done to Alaska and our nation’s economy to Trump’s legal drama,” she lamented.
Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan (R), who is running for U.S. Senate in Maryland, was one of the few Republicans with a significant national profile to break with other Republicans who were critical of Bragg’s case and the jury’s verdict.
“At this dangerously divided moment in our history, all leaders — regardless of party — must not add fuel to the fire with more toxic partisanship,” Hogan said Thursday. “We must reaffirm what made this nation great: the rule of law.”
But that provoked a furious reaction from Trump’s camp that could spell trouble for Republicans in November.
“You just ended your campaign,” Trump adviser Chris LaCivita wrote on X, reposting Hogan’s comments.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told The Hill before the verdict was released that a conviction would likely not harm Trump’s support among GOP voters.
“I don’t think it will have any impact on their support, in part because people have already processed it. They know about the relationship with Stormy Daniels, they know about the payment, there was nothing particularly new that came out of the trial,” Romney said. “What the jury does, one way or another, probably won’t make any difference in terms of President Trump’s support.”
“When I was competing against [the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)] in 1994 [in the Massachusetts Senate race] people said, ‘You need to mention Mary Jo Kopechne,'” he said, referring to the young woman who died in a car accident while Kennedy was behind the wheel in 1969.
“People have already thought about it, made a decision and moved on. Once people make that decision, bringing it up again does nothing but anger them,” he said.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
