How Donald Trump convinced Republicans his problems were their problems — again

The tone was set early last year ahead of Trump’s first indictment in March. Ron DeSantis faced an instant wave of pushback for even just mentioning the details of the case — an alleged affair with a porn star and hush money payments to cover it up — and quickly dropped it. Trump’s once-flagging poll numbers surged and his lead never came down again.

One senior campaign official noted that the Manhattan D.A. case was widely depicted among Trump critics as the weakest of the various charges circling around him. Recognizing that, top aides to Trump worked early on to define the rest of Trump’s legal troubles around it. As they did, they quickly discovered another benefit: The news tended to push his upstart opponents offstage, denying them oxygen throughout the race.

91 indictments and several civil cases later, nothing significant has changed — Trump’s rally refrain that he’s “being indicted for you,” and his early and repeated promise of “retribution” for those responsible, are the most relevant slogans anyone in the contest has come up with.

“Nobody wants to be indicted, but when the other side is coming at you with so much hate and vitriol, you can’t do anything else but fight back even harder,” Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung told Semafor. “There is nobody better at weaponizing a negative.”

You could spend thousands of words on how Trump and his allies laid the groundwork for a comeback in Iowa, and how his opponents stumbled on tactics or strategy, but it’s the way voters have continued to identify with his legal struggles — even when they have little to do with his presidency or with policy — that has defined the race. The rest is details.

Trump’s rivals are still desperately looking for an effective counter to the idea that Trump is a fallen martyr who must be resurrected with Republican votes.

Haley has told voters to move past Trump’s “chaos,” but she’s struggled to explain just what percentage of that chaos Trump brings on himself versus how much is unfair punishment meted out by bad actors. “It’s both,” she told CNN.

DeSantis, who answered a question about his biggest regret in the race by complaining the indictments “distorted the primary,” has tried to frame Trump’s problems as a general election liability — regardless of how voters feel about them.

“It’s going to be about January 6, legal issues, criminal trials — the Democrats in the media would love to run with that,” DeSantis said in Wednesday’s debate. “I’m not running for my issues, I’m running for your issues.”

In some cases, rivals have actively leaned into Trump’s frame: “If you want to save Trump, a vote for me is the way to do it,” Vivek Ramaswamy told Iowans on Thursday (a line that seemed to annoy Trump, who otherwise tends to praise Ramaswamy).

This situation isn’t exactly new. Trump was frequently accused by GOP critics of dragging voters into his legal and business soap operas in his first run for president. What’s different this time is that, thanks to his 2016 victory, Republicans have spent seven years developing an elaborate framework and vocabulary to explain away his problems — ”the deep state,” “weaponized government,” “partisan prosecutors”— that his base has fully internalized.

Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen hardened into GOP mythology years earlier with little internal resistance, making it difficult to attack him on electability grounds. Nor is there an easy way for the opposing candidates to litigate the details of his individual criminal charges without sparking a defensive reaction from Republican voters, even a classified documents and cover-up case that reads like a gross parody of his own “Lock her up!” chants against Hillary Clinton. That makes it difficult to name his ethics, competence, or character as the problem either.

In fairness, blaming the candidates for failing to undo the Trump victimization complex feels a bit like blaming individual beat cops for not fixing all the social ills of poverty, mental illness, and addiction. It’s all way too much for any one underdog in a divided field to take on, especially without any significant backup from the broader Republican Party, which mostly resigned itself to Trump’s return when his second impeachment failed.

But the results are obvious: If candidates are unable to challenge Republican voters’ assumption that the last three years featured a traitorous plot to steal the 2020 election followed by a multi-pronged conspiracy to jail and harass Trump ahead of the 2024 election, then it’s hard to argue Trump’s legal issues are some irrelevant distraction. When Trump spends the final days before Iowa posting dozens of unprintable Truth Social rants about E. Jean Carroll, who has already been awarded $5 million by a jury that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, it’s a strong closing argument in that context.

Groups working to oust Trump have sworn all year that — whatever Republican voters tell pollsters to stick it to the libs — there’s an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Trump’s daily drama, including in Iowa. And while the base responds to it so far, it seems to be playing less well in independent-heavy New Hampshire, where even Trump’s own campaign polling shows a single-digit race in a two-way contest with Nikki Haley.