Trump Indictment Palooza - Rob Horowitz

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Rob Horowitz, MINDSETTER™

 

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Former President Donald Trump PHOTO: File

The long-awaited season of Trump indictments is about to start. As soon as sometime later this week, it appears that a grand jury convened by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, will at his urging indict the former president in a case that centers around his disguising a $130,000 hush money payment as a business legal expense.   The payment was aimed at preventing the porn star Stormy Daniels from going public in the critical final weeks of the 2016 presidential election about an affair she claims she had with the then-reality television star.

 

This anticipated indictment is only the first of several indictments of the former president that are likely to be unveiled between now and September or so.  Most legal experts believe it is far more likely than not that Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, will soon indict the former president and several others for using illegal means in their disgraceful efforts--unmoored from truth, evidence or legal merit--to overturn the results of the Georgia presidential election.  Similarly, it is more likely than not that Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Merrick Garland, will move forward with indictments of Mr. Trump in either the case of the mishandling of federal documents and obstructing government efforts to recover them or for his actions on and leading up to January 6. In fact, it is very possible that the former president will be charged in both these matters.

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A number of pundits have speculated that these indictments--if they materialize--will benefit the former president politically because they will energize his base who believe he is being targeted unfairly and enable him to play the victim. I differ.  While there may be some short-term political benefit in terms of his quest for the Republican nomination from the indictment in the hush money case, which appears to be the least serious of the legal challenges that face him, the impacts over time of multiple indictments are nearly certainly damaging—if not fatal-- to what was already an uphill battle in the general election. Even in the nomination contest, my guess is the costs will far outweigh the benefits.

 

 Donald Trump remains very unpopular with the general electorate. He is viewed unfavorably by 58% of registered voters, while only 36% view him favorably, according to a recent Quinnipiac Poll. The saturation-level news coverage of these indictments and any trials that proceed are only going to make these negative perceptions more intense and harder to reverse and may well persuade an even higher percentage of Americans to dislike the former President and believe he is unfit for office. 

 

More specifically, the news generated by these indictments about the former president will damage him with precisely the key swing groups-- independents and moderates, including some moderate Republicans-- that Trump needs to win a significantly larger slice of in 2024 than he did in 2020 to have a fighting chance in the general election.  Stepped-up coverage of his disgraceful efforts to overturn the 2020 election with prosecutors charging that what he did was not only unethical and counter to democratic norms but criminal is not a recipe for winning back swing voters, who already mainly disapprove of the former president.  He is also not going to win back voters by more attention paid to allegations that he obstructed justice to retain top secret documents that didn’t belong it to him; nor for moderate and independent women particularly, does a reprise of Stormy Daniels related information put the former president in a positive light.

 

Further, we can count on Mr. Trump to make his own situation worse, overplaying his hand. By repeatedly calling on people to protest his anticipated indictment in Manhattan over the weekend and doing so in all caps, counter to the advice of his campaign strategists, he is already reminding people of his role in inciting violence on January 6.  And if past is prologue, as the former president grows more desperate and agitated, he is likely to up his provocations and outrageous false statements. This will put a barrier in the way of gaining the new support he must have to win, even if there is some additional engagement from his base.  Additionally, these looming legal battles will nearly ensure that Mr. Trump focuses even more on his own grievances, rather than outlining a compelling vision for the nation, magnifying an existing weakness of his candidacy.

 

This will all likely result in the former president doing markedly worse than Ron DeSantis and other Republican presidential candidates, once they get better known, in head-to-head polling matchups with Joe Biden, giving his opponents more ammunition that Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket is a prescription for defeat. These poll results will reinforce a perception already shared by a subset of Republican primary voters that Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket makes it harder to win, resulting from the fact that his leadership and actions produced disappointing results in the past 3 general elections.  And this is before we get to the straightforward case that opponents can make: simply put, it is too risky to run someone who is officially charged with crimes and may end up sentenced to prison or even jailed during the campaign.

 

All-in-all, even for Republican primary voters, these likely indictments will create more receptivity to the argument that whether or not you think Mr. Trump is being treated unfairly, it is still time for someone with less baggage, someone younger who is more focused on the future-not marinating in their own grievances.

 

For Donald Trump, the multiple looming indictments not only threaten to put him behind bars; they are a major obstacle to his quest to regain the presidency, making it substantially more uphill.

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.


 

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