Any other politician would have withdrawn. Trump? No chance.
In another era, a politician would have walked away.
For decades, American elected officials faced with criminal charges or serious violations of public trust would relinquish their positions of power, even if only reluctantly, citing a duty to save the country from shame and to relieve pressure on its institutions.
Then came Donald J. Trump. The former president is not only continuing despite four indictments and 91 charges, but is actively orchestrating a head-on clash between the country’s political and legal systems.
The fallout continued to play out this week, as the fundamental question of the former president’s eligibility for office was all but foisted on a Supreme Court already embroiled in unprecedented questions surrounding Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election.
But the heated legal debate over whether or not Mr. Trump was involved in an insurrection obscured the extraordinary reality that he is running for president at all — he returns with a new vengeance and a familiar playbook built around the notion that he never can lose, will never be convicted and will never truly disappear.
That blueprint remains largely intact because his approach continues to yield political returns.
Rather than worrying about the collateral damage that comes from his never-surrender ethos, Trump appears energized by conflict, closely intertwining his legal defense with his presidential campaign. He has tried to buy time from his criminal trials, a strategy that scored another victory Friday when the Supreme Court declined to immediately rule on a key point of contention in his 2020 federal election case.
While this year started with most Republicans pollsters tell that they preferred another presidential candidate will turn the calendar to 2024 about two-thirds of the party that supports Mr Trump. His legal troubles, which in recent decades would have strengthened rivals for a major party’s presidential nomination, have only served to further unite Republican voters around him.
“This has been the mystery of the Trump era — every time we think this is the last straw, it turns into a steel beam that only reinforces his political infrastructure,” said Eliot Spitzer, a former Democratic governor of New York. Mr. Spitzer resigned as governor in 2008 over a prostitution scandal and said at the time he owed the same to his family and the public.
Lately, Mr. Trump has faced increasing criticism for using fascist language and authoritarian tactics. Defending himself, he repeatedly insisted this week that he had never read “Mein Kampf,” Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto.
Of course, if there was a manual on how to run traditional American political campaigns, he wouldn’t have read it either.
Early in his 2016 bid, he disparaged decorated military veterans, and voters looked past it. When a hot-mic recording surfaced of Trump casually claiming that celebrity status made it easier to sexually assault women, he resisted calls from fellow Republicans to step aside, dismissing the comments as ‘locker room talk’ and won 32 days later. The Presidency.
The cycle repeated itself for years, leading to a kind of truism in the Trump world that the whirlwind of chaos and coup surrounding the former president was almost always surprising, but rarely shocking.
In other words, the absurdity of it all always seemed perfectly logical.
Even the riot by Trump’s supporters at the Capitol almost three years ago adhered to that adage. Whether the attack was the ultimate coda to his presidency or the beginning of a darker phase in American politics, the violence was, in retrospect, as horrific as it was foreseeable.
After all, Mr. Trump had spent four years wielding the mighty pulpit of the White House to insist that every critical reporting was a lie, that no elected official he opposed should be believed and that the courts could not be trusted.
The story in Washington again unfolded in a way that was surprising – but hardly shocking. Days after Mr. Trump left office, polls showed him maintaining high levels of support within his party. House Republicans who voted to impeach him became targets of censure and primary challenges. Republican leaders visited him at Mar-a-Lago – a steady stream of supplicants bowing before their exiled king.
It quickly became clear that the Republican Party’s best chance to overrule Trump was over when 43 of its senators voted to acquit him in his impeachment trial following the Capitol riot.
In an interview last month, Trump all but bragged about continuing his latest presidential campaign despite his criminal charges.
“Other people, if they ever get charged, they’re out of politics,” he told Univision. “They go to the microphone. They say, ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life clearing my name. I’m going to spend the rest of my life with my family. ”
“I’ve seen it hundreds of times,” Mr. Trump said, concluding that such decisions were always mistakes. “I can tell you it has had an adverse effect on them.”
Trump’s involvement in the fight is rooted in a “preoccupation with not being seen as a loser,” says Mark Sanford, the former Republican governor of South Carolina who considered resigning as governor in 2009 when an extramarital affair erupted into scandal. national circumstances. headlines.
He ultimately remained in office, recalling in an interview this week that he had wanted to take responsibility for his actions and had hoped that his remorse and humility would serve as an example to his four sons and lead to reconciliation with his constituents.
Mr. Sanford said he doubted Trump had ever considered running for office.
“If he’s thinking about what’s best for the republic, that would mean having a frontal lobotomy,” Mr. Sanford said. “From the number of people he has sued over the years, the number of subcontractors he has defrauded and all his bankruptcies, he has bullied his way through life. He’s playing to an audience of one, and it’s not God – it’s Donald Trump.”
Former Sen. Trent Lott, a Republican from Mississippi, said he would advise Trump to end his presidential campaign if any of the former president’s federal cases resulted in a felony conviction.
Mr. Lott, a former Senate majority leader, was forced from his leadership position in 2002 after praising Strom Thurmond, a longtime senator and staunch segregationist who died the following year.
“At some point, someone has to tell him to do what is in the best interest of the country and stop his campaign,” Mr. Lott said of Mr. Trump. “But so far I don’t see any indication that he plans to go anywhere other than back to the White House.”