For Democrats, the weakness of Bragg’s case against Trump is the point
Hugo Gurdon
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For many Democrats, the weakness of their attacks on former President Donald Trump is a feature, not a bug. They’d abandon their efforts to destroy Trump if they stood a chance of succeeding. It is important to understand this as one indictment (at least) looms over Trump as a 2024 candidate.
The Left’s supposed effort to expunge Trump from politics is like a gem with many attractive and glittering facets. Going after Trump draws attention to him and tars Republicans by their proximity to him. It lets Democrats argue falsely that red party members yearn for the orange man’s return, when a huge number, probably most, long for him to go away. And it allows Democrats to claim the moral high ground by suggesting they’re doing their utmost to block his path back to power.
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The focus on Trump, though hostile, gives him massive free publicity of the sort that elected him in 2016. It boosts him. Best of all, each such gambit fails, so he doesn’t disappear but hangs around the GOP like a bad smell. Ironically, this makes Republicans likelier to pick him — the one presidential nominee whom the hapless President Joe Biden can beat.
Trump is thus a very good thing for Democrats and a very bad one for Republicans. Any number of GOP leaders and party rank and file would love Trump to vanish. Many wouldn’t vote for him if he won the GOP presidential nomination, which would make Biden’s reelection more likely.
That is why an equal or greater number of Democrats love that the former president is running again. Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, conducted a Twitter poll that revealed Democrats prefer Trump to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) as the GOP presidential nominee by 57% to 43%. They want to run against him. For Biden and the blue party, Trump’s highly possible success in the primary campaign and inversely dismal prospects in the general election open up another four years in which they can drag America further to the left.
So, many Democrats want to keep Trump around for as long as possible. But they stay quiet about that and talk as though all they want is to remove his stain from politics entirely. Certainly, some would be happy to see him gone if they could take the credit for his final departure. They have no interest at all in him being ousted by the normal democratic process of Republicans deciding they’d prefer someone else. The looming indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a case in point.
Bragg appears set to charge Trump with improperly paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, a porn star. She claims she had a relationship with Trump that was short and to the point. Bragg might try to turn the misdemeanor of falsified business records into a federal crime by treating the money as an illegal campaign contribution. But it would be long a prosecutorial stretch, and the odds of conviction are slim.
It would sustain Trump front and center in the worst possible light for much of the 2024 election cycle, it would stoke his base of support, and it would deepen the split in the GOP. But for Bragg, a partisan Democrat, that is the point.
Or take Trump’s impeachments. There was a plausible case for his ouster in January 2021 for his culpably irresponsible and dangerous behavior stoking the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But he was going to leave office only two weeks later anyway, so the impeachment was mostly for show, to make Trump the only president ever impeached twice. Partly because of this, there was no chance of Senate Republicans helping give it the two-thirds majority it needed for conviction.
Similarly, the first impeachment was mostly a charade. Democrats had decided on impeachment by Inauguration Day 2016 but were agnostic about what charge to hang it on. For two years, they puffed hot air into the Russia collusion hoax to keep it aloft. Then, when it collapsed, they clutched at straws, and the one they grabbed was Trump’s questionable phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. There was never the slightest chance he’d be convicted. This was partly because of the unpersuasive particulars of the case but mostly because Democrats had been so obviously determined to inflict this humiliation on him with whatever flimsy pretext came to hand.
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Democrats want to wound Trump politically, but they are happy not to kill him. Their stratagems enrage him, but they are delighted when, in consequence, he rages. In that mode, which is now his only shtick, he is an electoral gift that keeps on giving to them. First, it was the Republicans’ congressional defeats of 2018, then Biden’s victory in 2020, and most recently, the GOP’s lamentable 2022 performance, exclusively by Trumpy candidates.
From the Democrats’ point of view, what’s not to love? For Republicans, however, the answer is nothing.