Trumps Bet: Criminal Case Will Help His Campaign, and Vice Versa

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PALM BEACH, Fla. At one end of the lavish Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, the former president made his first public comments about his arrest. At the other end of the hall, a space lit by 16 crystal chandeliers and larger than four professional basketball courts are several cardboard boxes stuffed with white campaign T-shirts.

The shirts read I STAND WITH TRUMP, and the date was printed on them in bold type: 03-30-2023 the day Mr. Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for his role in a hush-hush scandal.

After the indictment of Mr. Trump, it has become impossible to tell where his legal defense ends and his presidential campaign begins.

The blurring of lines between his White House bid and his mounting court battles is at the center of a high-stakes, norm-shattering bet from Mr. Trump: that he can sway public opinion to the degree that he can at once. strengthen his legal case and galvanize enthusiasm and campaign contributions from his supporters.

His legal calculation, according to aides and allies close to him, was that his pressure campaign against the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, would lead to his acquittal and prevent other prosecutors from sought additional charges even though some of his lawyers warned him that was unlikely.

In politics, the approach of Mr. Trump is to paint himself as a victim of Democratic persecution, building sympathy and goodwill to help his campaign for a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination.

President Trump is wrong to speak this way, he has a duty to use his bully pulpit to expose corrupt and out-of-control prosecutors, said Rod R. Blagojevich, a former Democratic governor of Illinois who was jailed for in corruption until Mr. Trump commuted his sentence to 2020. I applaud him for this.

Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly made baseless accusations of wrongdoing by Mr. Bragg.

No one can say whether the recent increase for Mr. Trump in the presidential primary polls is the result of his interweaving of legal and political tactics, or the recent stumble of his chief potential Republican rival, Gov. Florida’s Ron DeSantis, or some combination of the two.

But the combination of Mr. Trump’s political and legal campaigns have been on display for weeks.

His public remarks about his arrest Tuesday were made from the same stage surrounded by the same Make America Great Again banners and American flags where he announced his 2024 White House bid nearly five months ago. past. One of the lawyers sitting near Mr. Trump at his arraignment in the New York courthouse was Boris Epshteyn, who provided both political and legal advice to the former president and other Republican candidates.

In the first major rally of Mr. Trump last month in Texas, his campaign distributed Witch Hunt signs for the crowd to wave. The campaign sent more than three dozen fundraising appeals to supporters this week, each referring to Mr. Trump. On Tuesday, an email solicited campaign contributions in exchange for T-shirts printed with a fake mug shot of the former president and the words not guilty. (New York authorities opted not to take an actual mug shot.)

Donald Trump has become a master at blurring the line between his own potential legal and political danger, said Rob Godfrey, a longtime Republican strategist based in South Carolina. But now that he is facing actual legal danger, it will be interesting to see how loyal his supporters are, if they have the same tolerance for chaos that he perpetuates and if any of his opponents figure out a way to get rid of anyone from him .

Mr. Trump has long looked to public opinion as a solution to an increasingly long list of personal dramas, political scandals and legal crises. He used similar tactics as president during the 22-month investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, and his approval rating has barely budged. He was urged by the legal advisers of Mr. Trump to create a team outside the structure of the White House to respond publicly to the inquiry of Mueller, but he refused.

One of the high water marks in Mr. Trump’s terms of re-election and fundraising came in February 2020, after he was acquitted by a Republican-controlled Senate in his first impeachment trial.

More recently, he has spent months trying to make state and federal prosecutors investigating his conduct appear indistinguishable from Democratic and Republican opponents who are actively trying to stunt his political career. .

Mr. Trump has proven his skills at using investigations, impeachments and indictments to boost his campaign coffers (and using a portion of those contributions to pay legal fees). His campaign claimed to have raised more than $12 million from online contributions in the last week since he was indicted by a grand jury.

But his strategy in the hush-money case to mix his legal problems with his 2024 presidential campaign carries significant risks and masks, at least for now, potential problems.

While the Trump team has celebrated the recent influx of campaign cash, there are questions about how many new donors he can tap and whether he can maintain his fundraising prowess without an immediate crisis looming. His only public campaign finance report so far showed less haul for a prominent political figure.

The bigger question for the former president is how attacks on the court system and law enforcement on Wednesday as he called on his party to defund the FBI and Justice Department in response to his criminal indictment will help. it’s up to him to win back moderate Republicans and independent voters who have defected to him. , and his preferred candidates and aspirations, for three consecutive election cycles.

Mr. Trump has used his status as a former president and as the front-runner for the Republican Partys 2024 presidential nomination to repeatedly tout the felony charges in New York (and open criminal investigations in Georgia and Washington ) as a politically motivated attack. undermining his bid for the White House.

But that message ignores a series of electoral setbacks for Republicans since Mr. Trump made him the face of the party. Trumps in 2016. The losses in 2018, 2020 and 2022 were largely the result of a Democratic base motivated to vote against him and a significant defection of moderate Republicans who were turned off by his antics.

Additionally, every major investigation focused on Mr. Trump began well before he announced his third presidential campaign. By the time he launched his White House bid in November, Mr. Trump had spent months pushing for an unusually early campaign introduction, a move intended in part to shield him from a stream of damaging revelations emerging from investigations into his attempts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election.

Similarly, Mr. Trump is using his legal battle to energize his ardent supporters and consolidate support in a divided Republican Party. Although public opinion polls show that Mr. Trump has a wide lead over most other primary contenders and potential rivals, with roughly half of the party remaining opposed to his candidacy.

In the Mar-a-Lago ballroom on Tuesday, Mr. Trumps campaign room with a center aisle for the former president and his VIPs to walk to their seats.

The aisle resembles something a wedding party might use as an entrance. But it also appears to include the very line that Mr. Trump vague: Mr. Epshteyn, one of the legal advisers of Mr. Trump, smiled and waved as the crowd cheered his arrival along with several campaign aides and family members.

The only crime I have committed, Mr. Trump said minutes later from center stage, was to fearlessly defend our country from those who seek to destroy it.

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