Trump Faces 2024 Split Screen of Campaign and Criminal Trials

The charges against Trump for mishandling classified documents come as members of each political party already view the others as a threat to the nation, polling shows. Republicans will see the case as a Democratic president persecuting their leading figure, prompting many GOP voters to demand a strong response from their presidential candidates, while Democrats will view Republicans as standing by an alleged criminal.

Trump will run for the White House with the case and a federal trial hanging over him. In fact, he faces the prospect of multiple trials. Trump has already been charged by New York prosecutors in a hush-money case, and remains under scrutiny in a federal probe of his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot as well as a Georgia investigation into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has denied wrongdoing in all those cases. 

How long the documents case could drag out is unclear. Special counsel Jack Smith said Friday he will “seek a speedy trial,” but Trump’s legal team is expected to fight on numerous procedural fronts, pushing the timeline well into next year.

If Trump wins the general election, he could attempt to pardon himself, or at least drop the federal charges. If another Republican wins the nomination, that person will face a litmus test from Trump supporters to pledge to do the same.

Republicans, meanwhile, will continue to question whether President Biden’s Justice Department has been fair to Trump in comparison with him and his scandal-plagued son Hunter Biden, who is under federal investigation over taxes and whether he made a false statement in connection with a 2018 gun purchase. His foreign business dealings are being probed by congressional Republicans. The younger Biden has denied any wrongdoing but has acknowledged “poor judgment” in business.

Already, Joe Biden has been peppered with queries from journalists about Trump’s indictment, and has said he had no role in the Justice Department’s decision to press ahead.

All that means Trump’s legal woes will share the 2024 election stage with—or even crowd out—questions of the 80-year-old Biden’s record in office and age, which the GOP has signaled it intends to make a big theme of the campaign. That may be good news for Democrats, who are eager to make the next election into a choice between the current president and his predecessor rather than a referendum on Biden, whose average approval ratings remain stuck just above 40%.

In the short term, some analysts said, Trump is likely to benefit politically from the indictment, as it allows him to channel Republican distrust not only of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation but of a broader set of American institutions, such as universities, media and big businesses, which many feel have been “weaponized” to attack conservative values and Republican figures. Trump is already raising campaign cash around the idea. “I will never give up, and I will never end this campaign,” read a Friday email solicitation.

“The main debate in this primary is: ‘Which one of you do I believe has the best chance of rescuing the country? Which one of you has the best chance of stopping the other side from destroying America’—and it’s not anything less than that,” said Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster and political consultant.

Every Republican candidate will now be asked about the indictment, he said, “and what our base wants to hear is, ‘If I’m elected, I will stop the weaponization of the Justice Department and the FBI’—and you have to say that resolutely.” 

Kelley Koch, GOP chairwoman in Iowa’s Dallas County, said Republicans in her state “will be looking at the candidates coming through our state and their response to this. It’s a moment to judge.”

The challenge for Trump’s opponents will be to echo his complaints about the justice system while also making the argument why the party should move past him. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest challenger so far, was quick to condemn the indictment Thursday night. “The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias and end weaponization once and for all,” he tweeted. He didn’t mention a pardon.

DeSantis is trying to sell himself as more effective and disciplined than Trump, suggesting to voters in early primary states he would eliminate the chaos and controversy that marked the former president’s tenure.

Republican distrust of federal prosecutors has grown in recent years, due in part to the lengthy special counsel investigation of Trump and his associates into alleged ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. Only 18% of Republicans held a positive view of the FBI in NBC News polling last fall, compared with 70% of Democrats—a 52-point difference. In 1995, more Republicans than Democrats held a favorable view of the agency by 2 percentage points.

More broadly, high shares of people within each party view the other party as not just misguided but as a threat to the nation, and the indictment threatens to further inflame those views. Asked if the Democratic Party’s agenda poses a threat that, if not stopped, would destroy America as we know it, about 80% of Republicans in an NBC News poll last fall said the statement matched their thinking very well or somewhat well. About 80% of Democrats said the same of the Republican agenda.

“People are praying—praying—on both sides for our leaders to be indicted or to have bad health. It’s a sad, sad state of affairs,” said Jeff Sakwa, former co-chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. “It’s now ‘us versus them,’ and that doesn’t benefit anybody.”

The intense focus on Trump’s legal issues coincides with the early stages of Biden’s re-election effort, including Biden’s first rally of the campaign, planned for next Saturday in Philadelphia with a group of labor unions. 

Republican leaders continued to rally behind Trump on Friday. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, writing on Twitter, complained of “a two-tiered justice system where some are selectively prosecuted, and others are not.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) late Thursday criticized the indictment as a “brazen weaponization” of justice and pointed out that classified documents were found at Biden’s Delaware home and former private office, which is the subject of a separate DOJ investigation.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah), a frequent Trump critic, was the rare Republican to suggest the distrust was unwarranted and that the former president “brought these charges upon himself.”

Some Republicans said that, in time, the indictment would drain voter support from Trump. 

“It will be an impetus for them to get up and take action, to say look we’ve got to have someone else,” said Rae Chornenky, a former county GOP chairwoman in Arizona.

“There has never been a time in history where someone has persecuted a former president so much as they have Trump,” said Gabriel Mallery, 44, an airplane mechanic from Cahokia, Ill. But rather than rally Republicans behind the former president, he said the indictment would likely weaken Trump among people who are tired of the continued controversy around him.

Democratic voter Carol Engelstad, 61, who lives near Indianapolis, worried that the indictment would have little impact on Trump’s popularity. “When he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support, he was right,” she said.

Still, she said that some of her Republican friends are less enthusiastic about Trump than they were at first and are quietly backing away from him. Engelstad said she hopes that the outcome of court proceedings would ultimately block Trump from running for president. “I hope he gets his due,” she said.

—Annie Linskey and Ken Thomas contributed to this article.

Write to Aaron Zitner at [email protected] and Alex Leary at [email protected]

Tap to View