The more contempt directed at Trump, the more his base loves him

O

nly two people can possibly benefit from Donald Trump’s 37-count federal indictment arising out of his alleged retention of classified documents: President Joe Biden and Trump himself.

Many Trump stalwarts have claimed that the indictment is part of an effort by the Biden Justice Department to remove the president’s currently leading Republican rival from the race. I suspect the opposite is closer to the case. The indictment makes Trump’s nomination as the Republican candidate more likely, and if there are any clever people close to Biden, they know that.

For his base, support of Trump is a brazen repudiation of the despised elites. The more Trump can portray himself as a “victim” of the establishment, the ruder the gesture. As he himself once boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and I would not lose any voters.” The more contempt directed at Trump, the more his base loves him.

President Biden knows that his only hope for re-election is to run against Donald Trump, and to make the fitness of the latter for the presidency the sole issue of the campaign. Trump lacks the discipline and mastery of the issues to mount an effective campaign against Biden’s agenda, which virtually every poll shows is deeply unpopular. And that is even before Congressman James Comer’s Oversight Committee has completed its work unraveling the Biden family influence peddling racket.

Also, the likelier Trump is to be the Republican nominee, the better the chances that Biden does not receive a credible primary challenger. Against Trump, Biden has a plausible argument that he can win. Thus, Trump on the ticket deprives a less senescent and more coherent Democratic challenger from arguing that the Democrats must find a new candidate or face certain defeat.

Even if Trump does not win the nomination, his indictment poses a very dicey problem for anyone who might replace him, and thus a plus for President Biden. Any successful challenger to Trump must nevertheless retain his MAGA base, and will thus feel forced in one fashion or another criticize the indictment, likely in a stupid fashion.

The other beneficiary of the indictment — at least in his own mind — is Donald Trump himself. First, as noted, it initially solidified his position in the polls. But more than that, it made him the center of attention. And attention is what he craves most of all. Prior to the 2020 election, I wrote that he preferred the adulation of his base to modulating his over-the-top personality enough not to terrify soccer moms. Despite having gained support among minority voters between 2016 and 2020, those gains were more than offset by the flight of white suburban voters.

His narcissism is so overwhelming that he cannot make the most basic calculations, political or otherwise, whenever his ego is touched, which is almost always. He has never made a single generous comment about a political opponent. And he goes out of his way to shower them with grade-school-level jibes. Thus, a statement that Andrew Cuomo did a better job responding to the Covid pandemic as governor of New York than Ron DeSantis did as governor of Florida — a claim, incidentally, that is easily refuted — will surely come back to haunt him in debates with DeSantis. And the claim that Charlie Crist, whom DeSantis defeated by 21 points in 2022, was a better governor of Florida just made Trump seem childish.

Trump seems to have courted a federal prosecution with reckless abandon, which itself shows a lack of the judgment needed to be president. As his former attorney general Bill Barr has written, he would never have been prosecuted for removing classified documents at the end of his presidency if he had merely argued about returning them thereafter for a period of time.

Rather, he is being prosecuted for ignoring a grand jury subpoena issued only after well over a year of fencing with the National Archives. Not only ignoring it, but removing documents from their previous location and then having his attorneys certify that a full search revealed no more documents to be returned — something Trump knew to be false, even if his attorneys did not. If he had a legal theory as to why the subpoena was invalid, the proper response was a motion to quash based on that theory.

The Washington Post credibly reported that Trump consistently rejected the counsel of his attorneys that he had no choice but to turn over the documents sought, and, in addition, spurned an offer by one of his attorneys to try to work out a deal with the Justice Department to avoid prosecution.

As with respect to certification of the 2020 election results, he chose to listen to a single legal advisor advancing the most wacko legal position. That pugilistic stance apparently satisfies Trump’s need to present himself as a really tough guy.

In that respect, his tough guy pose is the flip side of Joe Biden’s Walter Mitty-esque fantasies of having been arrested in civil rights demonstrations, of having been offered a college football scholarship, and of having graduated near the top of his law school class, rather than in the bottom half.

Trump partisans will argue endlessly that Hillary Clinton’s handling of sensitive classified documents was far worse. And they will be right. Top secret information transmitted over Clinton’s unsecured private server was far, far more likely to fall into enemy hands than boxes stored at Mar-a-Lago. And the use of such a server — most likely to screen the Clinton Foundation from too much scrutiny — should have disqualified Clinton from the presidency.

But that does not thereby qualify Donald Trump, who in his oath of office promised to execute and uphold the laws of the United States, to be president. Considering oneself above the law or immune to its reach should also disqualify one from being president of the United States.

Consider a homely analogy as to why the argument from the pass granted Hillary Clinton does not work. Progressive prosecutors across the United States have consistently released those accused of violent crimes back onto the streets and drastically undercharged them for their crimes. Does that mean that when those prosecutors are turned out of office, their successors are enjoined from deviating from their example?

EVEN EASIER than figuring out who benefits from the Trump indictment is figuring out who loses from the indictment sucking up all the air in the room: the American people. They have already indicated by a wide margin that they do not wish to see a replay of the 2020 presidential election. Even a majority of Democratic voters say that Biden is too old for the job. And the thought of Kamala Harris succeeding him as president terrifies Democrats only slightly less than Republicans and independents. At least Biden, by virtue of his half a century in D.C., built up a cadre of nominally qualified advisors to guide him. Harris cannot even hold on to her senior staffers.

A replay of 2020 ensures that media coverage for the next year will focus almost exclusively on Trump’s antics and Biden’s unintelligible statements and wandering around stages. Trump’s New Hampshire town hall meeting on CNN served notice that he fully intends to relitigate the 2020 election results on the stupidest possible claims.

No one wants to hear that. Republican candidates in 2022 who endorsed Trump’s election claims in order to win his support in contested nomination battles uniformly went down to defeat. One of Trump’s repeated claims was that the Dominion Voting Systems machines were rigged to weigh Biden votes more heavily than Trump votes. That was conclusively disproven in the Georgia recount. In Georgia, a paper printout was generated for every machine ballot cast. And when those printouts were recounted, the results remained the same. As John McCormack noted in the conservative National Review, there is no way to count a paper ballot as more or less than one vote.

Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s primary election lawyers, defended herself against a defamation suit by arguing that her statements were so obviously absurd that they could not constitute defamation. And Fox News, which repeatedly broadcast the claims about Dominion, paid out $787 million to settle Dominion’s defamation suit. Apparently, it did not feel that truth would be a defense.

(Incidentally, had Trump claimed the election was rigged by the government-social media complex suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop, as a number of Trump haters boasted afterwards, he would have been on much stronger grounds, albeit without a remedy.)

In the next four years, the United States will face a plethora of critical issues: Should the US defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, or, alternatively, how should it deter such an invasion? What to do about a nuclear threshold and highly destabilizing Iranian regime? How can the potential of AI be unleashed without presenting unacceptable dangers to mankind? How to repulse Russia’s invasion of Ukraine without drawing down America’s arms supplies to unacceptable levels? Does climate change constitute a threat to the existence of mankind, and if it does, what steps can be taken to combat it that do not impose unacceptable burdens on those now living and impinge too greatly on human liberty? How to restore a culture of civic and civil debate to our universities and politics? And so on and so on.

All these issues are highly complex and multifaceted. American voters will want to know that the candidates have the ability to analyze complex topics, and will want to know what they think about them.

On the evidence to date, neither the president nor vice president are up to the task. And clearly, Trump — with his obsessive TV-watching to see what people are saying about him, and the social media habits of a badly addicted teenage girl — is not either. Or he would not spend his time in poor man’s imitations of the late and unfunny “insult comedian” Don Rickles.

It is hard to gainsay the judgment of National Review Online’s Jim Geraghty, that the 2024 campaign promises to be even dumber than the 2020 campaign.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 967. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)