The writer is an FT contributing editor
Brace yourselves. It seems more likely than ever that Donald Trump will be the Republican party’s nominee for the presidency in next year’s election. But not because Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, just in time for Easter, has likened his arrest to that of Jesus Christ.
The “base” was always going to buy Trump’s repeated assertion that he is the victim of a “witch hunt” orchestrated by George Soros and his puppet-accomplice, the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, doing the bidding of “radical left lunatics” to thwart his righteous Second Coming. The “real criminal”, Trump moaned in the low-energy litany of grievance he aired at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, was Bragg; the only crime he himself had committed was to defend America against those who sought to destroy it.
Deploying his usual tactic of turning accusations against himself back on to his adversaries, Trump characterised the charges against him as a systematic attempt to “interfere with the election of 2024”. Likewise the investigation of his recorded efforts to get Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” him the 11,780 votes he needed to win, can only be explained by the fact that Fulton County’s district attorney running the inquiry, Fani Willis, is “racist” (read, black). When asked, Willis’s unruffled response was to uphold Trump’s First Amendment right to say anything he wanted, provided it did not rise to the level of personal threats or incitement, while brushing off the slur as “naturally ridiculous”.
But for all of you losing sleep at the prospect of a second Trump term and the collapse of the constitutional democratic Republic that would likely go with it, here’s the good news: all the devotion of the “MAGA” world to their hero and martyr does not a presidential victory make.
While a large majority of Republicans go along with the Trumpian view of political persecution, a majority of the electorate doesn’t feel the same way. A Marist/PBS poll taken the week before the court appearance had 56 per cent declaring the investigations — including special counsel Jack Smith’s inquiry into Trump’s role in urging a mob to “persuade” Mike Pence and the Senate to void the decision of the electoral college, and Trump’s removal of presidential records to Mar-a-Lago — as fair.
More significantly still, this number included 51 per cent of independents. Sixty-one per cent of all those asked said they did not want Donald Trump to be elected president in 2024. In case any of them were having doubts as to whether disguising the reimbursement of hush money payment to Stormy Daniels amounts to a felony, neither the conspiracy operetta Trump performed following his arraignment nor his B-movie apocalypse script (“I am your retribution”) are likely to make middle America warm to his reoccupation of the White House.
On Tuesday evening, we did hear from middle America — in the improbably significant election of a seat to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. Despite Trump’s own urge to his loyalists to protest, and the media’s perspiring efforts to gin up the performative melodrama, the day turned into a bit of a historic nothingburger. In contrast, what went down in Wisconsin was a better bellwether of what 2024 might hold in store.
At the end of a campaign that vacuumed up record amounts of donations for a state Supreme Court election, and which produced a record turnout, Judge Janet Protasiewicz, hailing from a working-class district of south Milwaukee, crushed her conservative opponent Dan Kelly by a whopping eleven points. Running on a pledge to overturn an 1849 ban on abortion never purged from state statutes, Protasiewicz’s victory created a liberal majority on the Wisconsin court that will last until at least 2025, during which time it is also likely to rule on issues specifically affecting elections: gerrymandered districts, the legality of drop boxes, and voter ID requirements that are among the most aggressively stringent in the country.
None of this is any guarantee that Wisconsin has now turned liberal — the same evening saw the conservative Dan Knodl defeat his Democratic opponent for a seat in the State Senate, giving Republicans a veto-proof majority in the assembly, including the power to impeach state officials.
But if 2024 is to be fought as a culture war (as Ron DeSantis, the self-designated nemesis of the woke would like), the message from Wisconsin is that the overturning of Roe vs Wade continues to be a much more potent mobilisation of votes in swing states than a crusade against the alleged infiltration of “critical race theory” into college and school curriculums.
Most commentary on the Trump indictment and the other ongoing investigations into possible criminal acts, has understandably concentrated on whether it will be an asset or a liability for his campaign. I happen to think that, in the end, the latter is more likely, but compared to another more profound point, all that is so much white noise.
What are being tested in these unhappy proceedings are the pillars upon which American democracy stands or falls: the power of truth; the blindness of justice to rank, wealth or office; and allegiance to the constitution. Never mind this particular grubby, egomaniacal, delusional wannabe autocrat — should those pillars crack and tumble, the American democratic experiment is surely done for.