2023-06-10 21:53:34
The controversial former president, candidate and doubly imputed Donald Trump is the epicenter on which the debate of the Republican Party primaries revolves. He already was before presenting his candidacy in November and his accusation in April –the first to an active or retired president–, and it will continue to be so after his appearance Tuesday in Miami Federal Court for a more serious case: retaining classified government documents at his private residence and refusing to hand them over when requested to do so by authorities. Trump’s second indictment, the first time that a former president has received a federal indictment, is directly related to his administration, and has come to revolutionize the primary campaign, which will be held in just over a year.
Ron DeSantis’ campaign isn’t dead, despite its Twitter launch fiasco
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As happened two months ago in New York, when the tycoon was accused of 34 counts of falsehood for concealing the bribery of actress Stormy Daniels, all presidential candidates will have to choose between three options: defend the ex-president before what he calls a “witch hunt”, criticize him and ask him to leave the race due to the large number of legal cases he is dragging, or keep a low profile and remain silent so as not to alienate the Trumpist voter base. No surprises, as in April, most have opted for the first.
“The instrumentalization of federal justice represents a mortal threat to a free society,” has tweeted Trump’s main political adversary, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. If he is elected, he has vowed that his administration “will bring accountability to the Department of Justice, remove political bias and end instrumentalization once and for all.”
More moderate has been Mike Pence, who was vice president during Trump’s term and This week he has revealed his plans to compete for the Republican nomination. “Every American is innocent until proven guilty. And no one is above the law. The handling of classified materials is a very serious matter”, he said in an interview. Hours later, he asked the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to make Trump’s accusation public: “He must stop hiding behind the special counsel and explain to us why this imputation has been necessary”, since, he believes, it will be “terribly polarizing ”.
Also the senator Tim Scottbusinessman Vivek Ramaswamy and the Governor of New Hampshire Chris Sununu, three of the contenders in the primaries have spoken in defense of the former president: “I promise to pardon Trump when he is president, on January 20, 2025,” Ramaswamy said. “You don’t have to be a Republican to identify injustice,” Scott said on Fox News, where he spoke of “instrumentalization of the Department of Justice.”
The most notable exception has been that of Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, who is also running for office with a direct rejection of Trump, and has asked him to leave the electoral race. Chris Christie, another of the most critical candidates, has been moderate in his words, assuring that “no one is above the law” and will speak “when the facts are revealed.” Other candidates, such as the former UN ambassador Nikki Haleyhave chosen not to comment on the matter.
Resilient to legal cases
The former president of the USA came out reinforced after the indictment in New York for the document forgery case and after the conviction for the case of rape of the journalist E. Jean Carroll. He amassed money from more donors for the campaign and found himself catapulted into voting intentions. He now alone dominates the Republican polls, with 53.8% of support, according to the FiveThirtyEight projection. Meanwhile, his main rival, DeSantis, has lost almost ten points in ten months and stands at 21.3%. At a long distance, Mike Pence is in third position, with 5.4% of support.
The Republican primaries are increasingly reminiscent of those of 2016. In his first presidential nomination, Trump was chosen ahead of 16 candidates, five of whom withdrew before the election. After the three announcements this week (Pence, Christie and the current governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum) there are already nine (eight men and one woman) the Republicans who intend to challenge him for the leadership of the party. And the top two, DeSantis and Pence, show no hint of criticism of Trump over his court cases. Rather, they have joined in criticizing the Department of Justice.
There is still a year to go before the Republican National Convention, which will decide who the party’s nominee for the US presidency is, but at the present time a repeat of the electoral face-off that took place in the last election seems very likely: Joe Biden against Donald Trump, two men of advanced age and low popularity.
To the current president the non-existence of alternatives within the Democratic Party benefits him, while Trump may benefit from just the opposite: despite the fact that he has many critical voices within the party, the division of delegate votes among alternative candidates could give him victory in the Republican primaries for the third time. Only two names seem fairly solid alternatives to Trump: DeSantis and Pence.
DeSantis wants to pass Trump on the right
After three disappointing election cycles for Trump, and DeSantis’ overwhelming victory in the November midterm elections, the re-elected governor of Florida he looked like the winning horse from a party that was increasingly openly calling for a Trumpist page to be turned over. Just two months ago, DeSantis had managed to trail Trump by 15 points in the polls. But this dynamic has changed, especially as a result of the impeachment of the former president in New York. At the moment, the distance between the two has doubled and they are already separated by more than 30 points.
The governor he is selling himself as the ideal candidate to defeat the left which names wokeor progressive, and uses his radical policies in Florida as a guarantee of the ultra-conservative discourse. In the four and a half years that he has been in power, he has legislated against sexual and racial education in schools, has restricted the discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation, has limited abortion to just six weeks of gestation , has criminalized peaceful protest, has launched an ideological and political war against Disney’s self-government, and has deported immigrants to Democratic states.
DeSantis’s ideology is not far from Trump’s, and he is trying to challenge him for space to the far right of the party. This gamble could get him the nomination, but he may also end up alienating moderate voters. Even so, unlike his adversary, he can say that he hasn’t lost an election to likely Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Despite the distance that still separates the two opponents, the polls show a tighter battle in Iowa, a battleground state, where DeSantis is two points behind (43%-45%). This is the first state where the Republicans will decide their preferred candidate, and their result often influences subsequent votes.
Pence, a moderate rebuke to his former boss
It is there, in Iowa, where, precisely, presented Mike Pence his campaign last Wednesday to try to unseat his former boss. In the final stretch of Trump’s term, the former vice president backed away from his voter fraud theories, which led to the storming of the Capitol. That January 6, 2021, Pence refused to follow the president’s order to annul the election and ratified Biden’s victory.
“The American people deserve to know that on that fateful day, President Trump demanded that I choose between him and our Constitution. Now the voters will face the same choice,” Pence said defiantly at the launch event. “That day Trump’s reckless words put my family and everyone on Capitol Hill in danger.”
It is the first time that a former vice president has decided to compete against his former boss for his party’s nomination. Unlike Trump, he has no pending cases with the courts, after the Justice Department closed the investigation into the dozen classified documents found at his home.
Trump benefits from the flood of candidates
The proliferation of candidates opposed to the former president can benefit him. Not only because it will divide the opposing vote, but also because it places him –even more– at the center of the primary debate: voters will have to decide whether to vote for him or opt for an alternative candidate. It is expected that even more candidates will present themselves, in a scenario similar to that of 2016, a fact that has led the Republican National Committee to establish minimum thresholds for voting intentions (1%) and number of donors (40,000) to be able to participate in electoral debates.
The first debate will be held on August 23 in Milwaukee (Wisconsin), and if the number of candidates is too large, it is scheduled to be done in two rounds. Trump, who sees himself as a winner, has already said that he does not plan to participate in any primary debate. But this decision, made by his lead in the polls, could change if DeSantis, Pence or another candidate closes in on him in the coming months.
We will have to wait and see how the Trump court cases progress, which also is being investigated in Washington and Atlanta for his involvement in the storming of the Capitol and for attempting to rig the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. In both cases, he could also face criminal charges. As he is accustomed to doing, he will try to continue getting political credit for his role as the victim of a “witch hunt”, while trying to delay the judicial processes until after the elections.
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