A convicted criminal as a candidate? Trump’s rivals avoid even raising it
It’s an obvious line of attack that has crept into the arsenal of rivals trying to stop former President Donald J. Trump ahead of Monday’s Iowa caucuses — if he is nominated as White House standard-bearer, the former president can do that. It’s entirely possible that you’ll be a convicted felon by Election Day.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis walked up to that bat during a debate Wednesday night, warning that a “stacked left-wing DC jury” will likely judge Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election, wondering: “What are the chances he’ll get through that?”
He then added: “What are we going to do as Republicans in terms of who we nominate for president? If Trump is the nominee, it will be about January 6, legal issues, criminal trials.”
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has been much more reluctant to raise his legal troubles, speaking almost daily about Mr. Trump as an agent of “chaos” and “disorder” without explicitly mentioning the 91 charges against him looming.
But perhaps inspired by voters wary of attacks on the former president, Trump’s closest rivals continue to avoid one ominous word: persuasion.
For the Republican Party, the reality of Trump’s legal danger is inescapable, and was underscored Tuesday as he left the campaign trail in Iowa to attend courthouse arguments over whether he can claim absolute legal immunity for any actions which he undertakes as president. Regardless of how voters feel about his charges of undermining the 2020 election, mishandling top-secret documents and falsifying corporate records to cover up potential sex scandals during the 2016 presidential campaign, any of these cases could happen before the election. can come to court.
And a conviction by a jury of his colleagues after a widely publicized trial could have a different outcome than the charges themselves, which Mr. Trump and most of his rivals dismissed as political attempts by Democrats to interfere in the presidential election.
“I actually still believe they will have a trial, and he will be convicted of at least one crime,” said Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor and federal prosecutor who is still continuing his search for the Republican presidential nominee. “That puts the Republican Party at risk: a flawed candidate, a historical precedent of a candidate convicted of a crime, and then a loss” in the general election.
That may sound like a powerful argument for Trump’s more prominent enemies, but many Republican voters don’t want to hear it. On Tuesday morning, Nick and Kadee Miller of Adel, Iowa, were waiting for Ms. Haley at an Irish pub in Waukee, Iowa, when both expressed doubts about the allegations Mr. Trump was facing. They supported Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis’ decisions to stay off course.
“I really believe that if you don’t have anything good to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all,” said Ms. Miller, a 49-year-old political independent who remains undecided on her choice of candidates.
Steph Herold, a 62-year-old retiree from West Des Moines, said such negativity directed at Mr. Trump would waste Ms. Haley’s time.
“What I like about Nikki is that she speaks in facts and truth,” she said. During Trump’s presidency, “we all fell back on the high school playground, beating people up and being bullies. That’s all we need.”
Bruce Norquist, a 60-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Urbandale, Iowa, was confident that a conviction would only strengthen Trump’s support, as the indictments did last year.
But this is not reflected in polls. Nearly a quarter of Trump’s own supporters told New York Times/Siena College pollsters in December that he should not be the Republican Party’s nominee if he is found guilty of a crime. About 20 percent of those who identified themselves as Trump supporters said he should go to prison if convicted of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. 11 percent in July.
“When you put it like that, a convicted felon, no, I don’t want to vote for a convicted felon,” Mrs. Miller said, breaking with her husband, who said he would “absolutely” vote for a convicted gentleman. Trump “if he could beat Biden.”
On Wednesday, Laura Leszczynski, a 57-year-old security and information technology business owner from St. Mary’s, Iowa, waited in a snow-covered vineyard in Indianola, Iowa, for entrepreneur turned presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. She was still undecided and admitted that she was not well informed about the cases against Trump, but she was not ready to fire him.
“It seems like there’s a lot,” she said. “I’m not a lawyer. I haven’t studied, but I’m worried.”
Yet it is perhaps no coincidence that the two Republican candidates most willing to raise the prospect of conviction — Mr. Hutchinson and former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey — single digits or worse in national polls among Republican primary voters before Christie dropped out of the race on Wednesday.
In his farewell speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Christie returned to the moment in the August Republican primary debate when nearly all the candidates on stage raised their hands when asked if they would vote for Mr. Trump even if he were a convicted felon .
“I want you to imagine for a moment that Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and Washington were sitting here tonight, honestly,” he said. “Do you think they can imagine that the country they risked their lives for would actually have a conversation about whether a convicted criminal should become president of the United States?”
Yet that conversation continues.
In an interview Friday with The Des Moines Register and NBC News, Ms. Haley danced around the prospects of a conviction for almost three minutes, “He’s innocent until proven guilty,” she said. ‘He’ll have to find that out. I don’t have to deal with those lawsuits.”
Mr. DeSantis is trying to recognize the danger. In an interview last month with conservative radio personality Hugh Hewitt, he blamed Trump’s legal danger on the liberals out to get him: “I think it’s very difficult for a Republican, let alone Donald Trump, to fair shock in front of a DC jury,” he said.
But as he has made his case against Mr. Trump more aggressively ahead of the Iowa caucuses, Mr. DeSantis has adjusted that argument.
“We are taking a huge risk by allowing a jury, probably a fully democratic jury in the nation’s capital, the most democratic area in the country, to reach a verdict,” he said. said in the NBC News interview“because if they rule against him, if they have a judgment against him, that will obviously hurt us in the elections.”
Nicholas Nehamas reporting contributed.