David M. Shribman
News flash: Even in steamy Florida, American politics have become subject to flash-freezing. The country’s civic life has turned cryogenic.
For months, the conventional wisdom was that Donald Trump’s potential entry into a campaign for a second term had frozen the field, keeping other Republican candidates out of the race for the party’s presidential nomination.
Now Trump, in the race for nearly five months, has frozen the field again, this time through the unlikely circumstance of being indicted, arrested, and booked. Stranger things have happened, but I can’t remember any of them.
Two astonishing elements emerged from one of the most torrid weeks in American political history. The legal case against the former president has been widely dismissed as weak, peripheral, and very possibly doomed.
And the circumstance of being the only former president to be forced to sit in court and face a 34-count indictment actually has strengthened Trump’s political prospects.
At the same time, two huge challenges emerged from the arraignment Tuesday.
Trump, who on Tuesday night tied his own fate to the country’s future, must find a way to decouple the two elements and campaign less on his grievances than on his vision for a second Trump term — a Herculean task for a man with an alphabet of only one letter.
But just as difficult, Trump’s rivals for the nomination must find a way out of the maze he has created: the near-requirement of Republicans to stand by MAGA’s man even though Trump has a record of, as Tammy Wynette sang, “doin’ things that you don’t understand.”
Or, as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida put it, in a clear reference to Trump’s apparent serial infidelities, doin’ things that they don’t approve of.
And it is DeSantis — the principal Trump rival following his landslide reelection here last year and his gun, education, and abortion proposals — who has the most to lose, and whose burden is greatest, as his rival faces new, more damaging and more consequential legal battles in New York, Georgia, and Washington.
A month ago, DeSantis was seen as a legitimate and formidable challenger to Trump for the GOP nomination. In the most recent Reuters/Ipsos Republican poll, Trump climbed 4 percentage points and DeSantis dropped 11 points — that in a survey taken a day before Trump’s courtroom appearance and, later, his reprise of his theme of repression, telling a Mar-a-Lago gathering, “The only crime I’ve committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.”
It was at that reception-cum-rally where he spoke of the special counsel examining his possession of secret documents as “that Jack Smith lunatic” and where he described New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. as “a local failed district attorney.”
The predicament for the Trump nomination rivals: They must speak with caution while their opponent speaks with recklessness. They must deliver dutiful paeans to the presumption of innocence required to be accorded to a man whom they seek to defeat — even while Trump engages in trash talk such as his dismissal of DeSantis, issued only a week earlier, as someone who might be working in “a pizza parlor place” without the Trump endorsement in his 2018 gubernatorial race.
Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, the declared presidential candidate who has established the clearest distance between himself and Trump, offered an awkward example: “While the grand jury found credible facts to support the charges, it is important that the presumption of innocence follows Trump,” he said after the indictment was unsealed. “We need to wait on the facts and for our American system of justice to work like it does for thousands of Americans every day.”
One by one, likely or declared presidential candidates issued statements much like Hutchinson, who 48 hours earlier had called on Trump to withdraw from the race.
Before Trump captured the 2016 presidential nomination, the governor spoke derisively of what he called “the Donald Trump show,” arguing, “The next generation of conservatives cannot allow Donald Trump to take everything we stand for and throw it away.” Weeks later, all opposition to Trump having been swept away, he endorsed him.
The Republican candidates aren’t alone in facing enormous challenges in the weeks ahead.
Bragg’s legal action was broadly condemned as too little and too early; Trump’s critics would have preferred that the first formal charges against him came from election meddling, a far more serious matter with far more consequential constitutional implications.
Bragg still must establish, and then flesh out, the more significant crime that is the predicate for his 34 counts. By the time he does that, the sting of Trump’s indictment almost certainly will have dissipated considerably.
Meanwhile, the best any of the other GOP candidates have mustered comes from DeSantis’ book, released six weeks ago with no foreknowledge of the particulars of the indictment.
DeSantis argues that political figures should lead “within the confines of a constitutional system,” and he is critical of elected officials (read: Trump) who believe “perpetuating themselves in office supersedes fulfilling any policy mission.”
DeSantis’ book is titled “The Courage To Be Free.” His campaign, and others’, calls for the courage to be free of the need to support Trump.
That requires candidates to engage with “the Donald Trump show” in an even more artful way than they contemplated when they began their campaigns.
“Suppose you don’t like Trump and think he should go to jail,” said Daniel Stone, a Bowdoin College professor who studies behavioral economics and game theory. “You may feel you can’t say that because you want the votes of some [of] Trump’s supporters.”
But Stone suggests there could be a downside to being too supportive of Trump:
“What does someone like DeSantis lose by not being supportive of Trump? I suppose he could drive some soft Trump backers away. But maybe there isn’t much political downside to being critical of him. Even the hardest-hearted politicians might have some preference to saying what they actually think and not being blatantly cynical and saying something they don’t really believe.”
Someone has to break the ice, or Trump will be frozen in place — atop the Republican field.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
