Republicans close ranks around Donald Trump, again
THERE IS something like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale to the whole affair. The hope that many Americans harboured that criminal indictments against Donald Trump would break his near-decade-long stranglehold on the Republican Party has been dashed once, then twice—and now thrice.
In March, Mr Trump was indicted by New York prosecutors over alleged campaign-finance misconduct. Republicans shrugged; the former president enjoyed a surge in the polls. Then, in June, Mr Trump was indicted over the retention of highly classified intelligence at his Florida estate of Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House; after leaving the courthouse the former president stopped by a famous Cuban restaurant in Miami, as though it were an ordinary day on the campaign trail. On August 1st new charges were unveiled over the most serious of his alleged crimes: the attempt to overturn the legitimate election results in 2020 which inspired his supporters to invade the Capitol on January 6th 2021. Once again he basked in good feelings. “Thank you to everyone!!! I have never had so much support on anything before,” he wrote online. When it comes to members of his party, it is hard to dispute the claim.
Even his rivals for the presidential nomination are largely in lockstep. In a post on Twitter (now officially called “X”), Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and his closest competitor, decried the “weaponisation of the federal government” and “the politicisation of the rule of law”. He admitted that he had not read the indictment, but argued that any trial conducted in Washington, DC, as the latest indictment would require, is a priori illegitimate because the jury would be constructed of those with “the swamp mentality”. Even in prior statements, Mr DeSantis has not seemed able to let go of the servility he displayed towards Mr Trump when his political career began its rapid ascent. He has previously pledged to sack Chris…
2023-08-02 15:05:19
Post from www.economist.com