Despite the recent indictment by New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, former President Donald Trump has managed to turn it into a positive boost fueling his bid to return to the White House in 2024.
Bragg is the first prosecutor in U.S. history to bring a criminal case against a current or former U.S. president.
Dennis Prager believes it’s all part of a plan.
“I would not rule out that this is part of the design by others who have influenced Alvin Bragg,” Prager told The Epoch Times. Yet he also conceded that Bragg “may have decided this completely on his own.”
Indictment Strengthened Trump’s Favorability
Prager—a columnist and nationally syndicated radio talk show host—is the co-founder of the Prager University Foundation. He also suggests Democrats and anti-Trumpers want the former president to run because they think he will lose to President Joe Biden.“Biden is so weak that it might be quite possible that the only Republican that they might be able to defeat is Donald Trump.”
As Politico reported, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) believes it’s politically advantageous for Democrats to have Trump “front and center.”
“Trump’s obviously an extremely dangerous person who would be very dangerous for the country. But I’m confident that President Biden could beat him,” Stabenow said. “Broadly, the public rejects him.”Recent polling tells a different story.
On May 7, George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s “This Week,” shared his thoughts on the survey.
“I’ve got to admit I have a hard time wrapping my head around that,” the veteran liberal broadcaster confessed. “You’ve got one in five people who say they believe President Trump should face criminal charges, but they would still vote for him.”
Post-indictment polling confirms that Republican support for Trump has grown stronger. A CBS News shows 58 percent of GOP voters support Trump. Among those, 94 percent said it was because of his performance as president, and 84 percent said it was because they thought he could beat Biden. Regarding a potential race between Trump and DeSantis, 58 percent picked Trump. Only 22 percent chose DeSantis, a spread of 36 percentage points.DeSantis Falls, Liberal Media Courts Trump
The Real Clear Politics average of national surveys has the Trump versus Biden contest at a statistical tie. But when it comes to the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Real Clear Politics’ Tom Bevan says, “The data is pretty clear.”The other thing Bevan finds interesting is the rating crash by DeSantis seems to coincide with what appears to be the launch of his yet-to-be-declared presidential campaign tour.
“He went on his book tour. He gave a speech at the Reagan Library. He’s been going around the country. He went overseas, and nothing has moved his numbers,” Bevan noted. “If anything, they’ve gotten a tad worse over the last five weeks from 24.6 on our average down to 22.9.”
While Bevan believes Trump got a significant ratings boost from Bragg’s indictment—having people rally around him because they felt it was politically motivated and it reminded people of the “any end justifies the means’ mindset of Democrats when it comes to Trump—he also sees that DeSantis hasn’t been able to move his numbers at all.
“Even as the indictment broke, people were expecting it to give Trump a brief bump, and then it would go back to where it was before,” Bevan said. “But they haven’t gone back. He’s maintained that, and I think that’s a pretty interesting dynamic.”
Asked about Prager’s belief that Bragg may hope to make history, Bevan said it’s possible.
“But I think there is another element,” he suggested, adding that “the people who go after Trump are not dumb.”
“They believe Trump will be easy to beat. Biden already beat him, and they want that match-up again,” Bevan explained. “On the media side of it, all of these news organizations joined the resistance movement right after Trump was elected in 2016. But now they’re right back where they were before that election. They can’t get enough of him in terms of their coverage of him.”
Bevan is also struck by the enthusiasm of those who still believe the indictment will hurt Trump, “especially with something as egregious as what Alvin Bragg has done, tying himself in knots to come up with some novel legal theory to press this charge after the statute of limitations has run out.”
“Even the New York Times wrote something earlier this week where they reviewed over 30 cases of record fraud similar to Trump’s, and Trump was the only one who wasn’t charged with another crime. In every other instance in Alvin Bragg’s office, including from his predecessor, they always included another substantive charge along with the records fraud charge. Knowing all that, they should have known that this would reinforce all of the things that folks on the right believe about the Democrats and the media and galvanized people to Trump’s side.
As for the ABC News/Washington Post poll, Bevan said the tight race “is not new news.”
“Democrats like Biden. They give him high marks on his job approval, and they think he’s doing a good job. But they don’t want him to run because they have concerns about his health, age, and mental acuity,” Bevan noted.
In spite of their support for Biden, Bevan said, Democrats “would like him to do what he said he was going to do, which was to be a transitional figure and pass the torch to the next generation. Most like him, but they want to give him the gold watch and see him off the stage and move on.”
The ‘Sympathy Factor’ and ‘Political Paralysis’
Jacob Rubashkin, a reporter and analyst providing nonpartisan news and analysis on campaigns for House, Senate, gubernatorial and presidential campaigns, agrees these “are not good numbers for” Biden. But he also noted that the 2024 elections are still some distance away.“All we can say on that with any real certainty is that it looks like we’re heading into a competitive presidential election no matter who the Republican nominee is,” Rubashkin told The Epoch Times, suggesting that here’s a lot of polling data on the pending Republican primary “to suggest Trump has really strengthened his position over the last five months.”
While Rubashkin also believes Trump’s polling boost “has a lot to do with the indictment,” he also thinks it’s “emblematic of the challenge Trump’s Republican opponents have in trying to take him on.”
“On its face, being indicted for anything is not a good look, regardless of whether or not Trump actually broke the law,” Rubashkin said. “Yet what we’ve seen is Republicans, by and large, are unwilling to treat any of that as negative. At most, you get these oblique remarks, like when DeSantis said, ‘I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star.’ That was the slightest of nudges, and look at the blowback it got him.”
Rubashkin also finds it interesting how Trump has been able to take what should be negative “and turned it into a rally around the flag moment within the Republican Party.”
“All of a sudden, his opponents are not only unwilling to attack him, they’re standing up for him,” Rubashkin said. “He’s managed to turn a vulnerability into a strength, and that’s something we’ve seen him do over and over again throughout the course of his presidency and now three campaigns. I think that has given him momentum in the numbers, and frankly, it has made Gov. DeSantis look a little weak. He hasn’t been able to go after Trump. Voters are responding, and Trump is on an upswing. DeSantis is on somewhat of a decline.”
Rubashkin also suggested that the accumulation of attacks Trump has faced adds up to a polling benefit.
“Trump has done well from the beginning,” Rubashkin suggested, adding that Trump “has been able to present himself as a very sympathetic figure to a crucial part of the electorate.
“Despite the fact that he’s this brash, wealthy real estate developer from New York, he has managed to find a political home among a large sector of the Republican Party that view him as a kindred spirit, and we’ve seen that from the get-go in 2015, and that has powered his political rise and kept him so integral along the way.”
Rubashkin also believes Trump’s supporters “feel like he’s one of them.”
“So when they see him facing the obstacles he does, like the Bragg indictment and a half-dozen other ongoing investigations, there is a sympathy factor,” Rubashkin posited.
“Even if they don’t like everything he does,” Bevan says, people who weren’t supporters are starting to see the raids and constant investigations as “unfair and politically motivated.”
“It endears him to them, clearly, and all of that accrues to his political benefit,” he explained.
Equally important is what Rubashkin describes as the “political paralysis in the anti-Trump/post-Trump establishment.”
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