It has been six days since the Justice Department indicted Donald Trump on felony charges related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and it’s already getting hard to keep up with the latest developments. On Monday morning, Trump, in a post on his social-media site, accused the special counsel Jack Smith of trying to deny his First Amendment rights by asking that the court order the former President not to disclose evidence prosecutors have gathered. Trump also criticized Judge Tanya Chutkin, an Obama appointee who has imposed tough penalties on some defendants involved in the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, repeating his demand that she recuse herself from the case. Meanwhile, in Florida, Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge in the classified-documents case, rebuked a government effort to seal the filings in that proceeding and asked the Washington-based prosecutors to provide more information on why they are still relying on an out-of-state grand jury.
Welcome to the second week of what Politico has aptly termed “the courtroom campaign” of 2024, an unchartered political environment in which the political-media class chews over every new legal development exhaustively, and the rest of the American public . . . let’s get to them in a bit. Trump’s demands in the 2020-election case seem to be largely without merit. It’s not unusual for courts to issue orders restricting the dissemination of evidence, and Chutkin is an experienced federal judge who was randomly assigned the case last week. Even one of Trump’s lawyers has expressed caution about trying to get her removed.
Still, even if these latest developments are just wrinkles, there is no getting away from other mind-bending Trump news. This past weekend, Mike Pence, Trump’s former Vice-President, and Bill Barr, his penultimate Attorney General, both said that they would be willing to appear as witnesses in their former boss’s federal trial. It seems almost certain that prosecutors will seat both Barr and Pence before a jury, given that they both have potentially compelling testimony to offer.
Appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Barr reminded viewers that on three occasions after the 2020 election, while he was still running the Justice Department, he told Trump “in no uncertain terms, that there was no evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome.” (Barr first mentioned these conversations in a book published last year.) Pence, in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Nation,” recalled how, the day before January 6, 2021, Trump’s lawyers asked him to “reject votes outright” and “overturn the election.” The former Vice-President went on to say, about Trump, “I don’t know what his intentions were, but I do know what he and his lawyers asked me to do.”
Appearing on the same CNN show as Pence, John Lauro, a lawyer for Trump, didn’t deny that his client had asked Pence to help him overturn the 2020 election, but said, “He asked him in an aspirational way.” Using similar language, Lauro told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that when, during a January 2, 2021, phone call, Trump asked the state of Georgia’s top elections official, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes,” that, too, was “an aspirational ask.”
Evidently, Lauro is a well-regarded defense lawyer. Like Smith, he once worked in the Office of the U.S. Attorney of the Eastern District of New York, which has produced many a legal “killer,” to borrow a term from Trump. Yet, for Lauro to have a realistic chance of getting his latest client exonerated, he’ll surely have to come up with something better than his Theory of Aspiration, which, at least on the face of things, appears to concede what is likely to be the crux of any trial—whether Trump knowingly aspired, and conspired, to do things that violated the law. As Barr said on Sunday, “You have to remember, a conspiracy crime is completed at the time it’s agreed to and the first steps are taken.” Whether the scheme ultimately works out or not isn’t the relevant issue.
In the face of these all-consuming developments, Trump’s rivals in the G.O.P. primary are largely being written out of the narrative. When they do appear, it’s often as mere commenters on the latest Trump news. Case in point: Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who has spent much of the past week trying to resuscitate his flagging campaign with a bus tour through Iowa, while also finally deigning to speak to the national press. In an interview with NBC News that was broadcast on Monday, DeSantis definitively rejected Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, saying, “No, of course he lost. Joe Biden’s the President.” However, when DeSantis was asked about the latest Trump’s indictment, he continued to repeat some of his opponent’s talking points, saying that the justice system “isn’t fair if it’s weaponized.”
For DeSantis and the rest of the G.O.P. field, the key question is whether the Trump indictments will continue to work in favor of the former President among Republican voters, or whether, between now and the primaries, some of these voters will tire of the entire saga, and Trump-fatigue will set in. If the election “is a referendum on Joe Biden’s policies,” DeSantis told NBC, then based on “the failures that we have seen . . . we will win the Presidency.” He continued, “If, on the other hand, the election is not about January 20, 2025, but January 6, 2021, or what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago, if it’s a referendum on that, we are going to lose.”
At this stage, much of the G.O.P. electorate appears to be rallying behind Trump. As I noted last week, however, there are some signs that the details the government presented in the classified-documents case has eaten into belief, even among Republicans, in Trump’s innocence. There was another interesting data point last week in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that was taken last week immediately after the 2020-election indictment was handed down. The pollsters asked people whether they would vote for Trump if he was “convicted of a felony crime by a jury.” Forty-five per cent of Republican respondents said that they wouldn’t vote for him; thirty-five per cent said that they would; twenty per cent said that they didn’t know. For the entire sample, sixty-seven per cent of voters said that they wouldn’t vote for Trump under those circumstances.
To be sure, this was just one poll, and it also indicated that many voters have concerns about the larger repercussions of the legal cases against Trump. Fifty-six per cent of the respondents agreed with the statement that “prosecuting Donald Trump for any crime will only deepen the divide in the country.” Evidently, many Americans are nervous about what lies ahead, which is perfectly understandable. Having successfully weathered Trump’s assaults in late 2020 and early 2021, the American system, and its commitment to the rule of law, is about to be tested again. ♦