Donald Trump’s fall 2024 general election campaign kicked off Thursday afternoon with a not-guilty plea. Facing a magistrate judge, the 45th president contested the conspiracy charges leveled against him by the government. He was released without posting bail. Minutes after the arraignment, Trump referred to his travails as “persecution” and called it a “sad day” for the United States.
None of Trump’s Republican rivals can compete with the free publicity and notoriety he will garner in the months ahead.
Unlike them, Trump is a certified martyr. Everyone else is ambitious, ungrateful or both. He will wear this latest indictment like armor while most of the Republican field will be left to sputter defenses of the former guy. That’s not how campaigns usually work.
By now, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy have internalized that the party’s base and machinery belong to Trump. There is nothing they can do about it other than bleat like sheep and wait.
Regardless, they already have their main talking point - attacking the District of Columbia as the trial venue. On Wednesday night, Trump posted on social media that it is “IMPOSSIBLE to get a fair trial in Washington, DC, which is over 95% anti-Trump”.
Two out of five of the district’s residents are African Americans, who are reliably Democratic voters. In 2020, Trump barely cleared 5% of DC’s vote.
Instead, he urges that the trial be transferred to West Virginia where he ran better than two-to-one ahead of Biden. The state is also the third whitest in the union, behind only Vermont and Maine.
“The latest Fake ‘case’ brought by Crooked Joe Biden & Deranged Jack Smith will hopefully be moved to an impartial Venue, such as the politically unbiased nearby State of West Virginia!” Trump exclaimed.
John Lauro, Trump’s lawyer, seconded West Virginia as a trial site, saying he was searching for a “more diverse area that has a more balanced jury pool”. When it comes to college admissions, however, the Republican party professes to be color-blind.
Already, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is echoing the man he supposedly yearns to supplant. “The reality is, a DC jury would indict a ham sandwich and convict a ham sandwich if it was a Republican ham sandwich,” the star-crossed candidate told Fox News. DeSantis is the one who is drowning and yet he is the one offering Trump a lifeline.
“I think the juries are stacked, I think that they’re going to want to convict people that they disagree with,” DeSantis added for good measure. Apparently, he forgot about Trump’s rally cry of “lock her up”.
As a legal matter, venue transfers are hard sells. The Watergate burglars and Paul Manafort lost their respective transfer motions decades apart. Politically, however, it’s catnip for the right. The number of Republicans who believe Joe Biden’s win to be illegitimate has floated back up to 70%.
Meanwhile, Biden has little reason to gloat. He stands mired in a 43-43 tie with a prospective felon. If two indictments barely moved the needle, don’t hold your breath for the third or fourth ones to be game-changers. Without a Trump conviction, we are talking heat without light.
Beyond that, it’s a race to the drain as to whether Biden or Trump is perceived more negatively. Both men turn off a chunk of the US. Meanwhile, Biden’s margins among key voting blocs continue to erode.
He is down to 16 points (49-33) among non-white voters without a four-year degree. His lead among Hispanic voters is evaporating (41-38), down 30% since election day 2020. If these numbers hold, Trump stands to flip a chunk of the electoral map. Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would again be in play.
Although inflation may be finally easing, working Americans have been socked with higher prices and watched their paychecks get stretched thin. “Joe Biden is more responsible for high inflation than for abundant jobs,” the Economist blared in May. “The main effect of the president’s economic policies has been to boost prices.”
Although the stock market has turned in a strong recent performance, those gains disproportionately benefit the rich; lunch-bucket US, not so much. The country is still hurting.
And then there’s Hunter Biden, the problem child who refuses to disappear. With Trump in prosecutors’ crosshairs, expect the Republicans to keep a spotlight on Hunter. And why not?
He’s a hot mess. A federal judge rejected his plea deal while information and documents continue to ooze out that tarnish the president by extension. In a sense, actual criminal culpability is beside the point.
The closer you look, the Bidens – including the president’s brothers – act like a family business, one that is marginally concerned about ethics and optics. Luckily for them, the Trumps and the Kushners monetized their government tenure, too.
A prudent White House would keep Hunter Biden away from state dinners. But this White House and the incumbent don’t always act prudently. For his part, Hunter relishes his defiance.
In his memoir, Beautiful Things, the prodigal son announces: “Having a Biden on Burisma’s board was a loud and unmistakable ‘fuck you’ to Putin.”
But it doesn’t end there. Describing a series of interviews he granted to the New Yorker’s Adam Entous, regarding Burisma and Ukraine, Hunter writes that he “didn’t know how cathartic the experience would be”.
Then for good measure, he adds: “It was my opportunity to tell everyone out there, ‘This is who I am, you motherfuckers, and I ain’t changing!’” Team Trump must be delighted.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
