Trump Isn't Entitled To Any Special Treatment
As we saw Sunday, longtime Trump apologist Mark Halperin predicted that “You are about to increase the odds that Donald Trump will win another four years in the White House. You could in fact be increasing his chances of winning dramatically, maybe even decisively.” On Monday, David Graham urged his readers not “dismiss Halperin’s prediction because he’s a washed-up source of conventional wisdom who’s been badly wrong in the past. Dismiss it because it makes so little sense in light of what we know now. Politics is contingent and volatile, which means that any prediction about what will happen is worth the pixels it’s printed on. The future here is especially hard to guess because nothing really like it has ever happened. As the Republican pollster Whit Ayres dryly told Politico, “I have never studied the indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate, … and I’ve never done any polling on the indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate.”
He's already fundraising off a possible indictment, but there’s a lot of debate right now as to whether the pending indictments are good news or bad news for Señor Trumpanzee. “[T]he assumption that Trump will profit,” wrote Graham, “seems to spring from hubris (among his allies) and self-protective fear (on the part of his critics and rivals). They are operating on a shared, obsolete conclusion that nothing can ever harm the former president. For a long time, this made sense. Despite a series of scandals that would have ended the career, much less the candidacy, of any other politician, Trump won the 2016 presidential election and then embarked on an even more scandal-ridden administration. Yet he seemed to chug away, indifferent to bad press. A narrative of Trumpian invincibility developed as an antidote to callow, wish-casting predictions of walls closing in on Trump.” He may be resilient, allowed Graham, but he isn’t invincible. He just lost three elections in a row— the 2018 midterms, his own reelection bid and the 2022 midterms.”
The noisy MAGA movement “will be furious that anyone would dare try to hold Trump accountable, view it as an act of political persecution, and make a great deal of noise about it. But no one should mistake the vociferousness of this group for size.” After all, the noisy MAGA movement is significantly smaller than the anti-MAGA majority in this country. But within the Fox-Newsmax bubble and inside the confines of the Republican Party, that MAGA slice of the electorate calls the shots, which is why we see the House Republicans announcing some kind of crackpot investigation of Alvin Bragg and why political tools like Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Traitor Greene, Gym Jordan and presidential vanity candidate Vivek Ramaswamy are running around like chickens without heads hysterically denouncing the pending indictments. As Punchbowl reported this morning, "3 House committee chairs-- Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) and House Administration Committee Chair Bryan Steil (R-WI)-- publicly demanded that Bragg sit for a transcribed interview and turn over material from his investigation, a stunning intervention by lawmakers in an ongoing criminal probe. The extent to which House Republicans are backing Trump has been necksnapping. Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s conference has been the base of Trump’s support among elected officials. And now they are using the powers afforded to them as the majority to back the former president. Jordan, one of the former president’s staunchest allies, said Bragg is only pursuing these charges because Trump is running for the White House again... So Trump isn't leaving the headlines anytime soon. Which is exactly how he likes it." And exactly how the Democrats like it as well.
But are Republicans really going to ignore the growing pile of baggage this loser is still accumulating? He can’t win a general election and a primary win would be good news for the Democrats. California Republican strategist and #NeverTrumper Mike Madrid: “It helps him in the Republican primary, but he was going to win the Republican primary, anyway… The intensity of a shrinking base is not the sign of a growing movement. It’s the sign of a dwarf star imploding.”
On Sunday Chris Christie has part of the This Week roundtable. The very first question was directed to him: “Governor Christie, what is Donald Trump doing, telling the world he's about to be arrested and calling for protests?” Christie was ready. “The circus continues. I mean, look, he only profits and does well in chaos and turmoil. And so he wants to create the chaos and turmoil on his terms. He doesn't want it on anybody else's terms. Jon, you know this. You know him well. He wants it on his terms. But, look, at the end, being indicted never helps anybody. It's not a help… [I]t helps his [primary] campaign. But, being indicted I don't think ever helps anybody.”