A guilty verdict against former President Trump is rallying moderate Republicans and longtime Trump skeptics to his side in a way that the Trump campaign has failed to do for months.
Longtime critics of Trump, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and moderate Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, have rallied to his defense after the verdict, as are other Republicans wary of Trump, such as Nikki Haley.
Haley said last week that she would vote for Trump over Biden and has so far remained silent on convicting Trump, but leading Republicans and even some of Trump’s biggest critics have said the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) is fundamentally unjust.
After the verdict, McConnell said “he should never have been charged in the first place” and predicted the conviction would be overturned on appeal.
Collins also said Bragg blurred “the line between our justice system and our electoral system” by running for district attorney on a promise to prosecute Trump.
“This decision, like the impeachment of President Clinton, has had dramatic repercussions across the country. The two scenarios are very different, but both had a massive rallying effect. With Clinton it was Democrats, with Trump it was Republicans who believed in judicial overreach,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and former senior aide to the House and Senate leadership.
Bonjean said McConnell’s surprising defense of Trump was a signal to other traditional mainstream Republicans to back the former president.
“He’s giving the mainstream Republican Party permission to support Trump come November,” he said.
Senate Republicans in particular know that their hopes of recapturing the majority hinge on Trump’s performance in battleground states, so with Trump facing possible prison time when he is sentenced just before the Republican nominating convention in mid-July, they have little choice but to stick together.
Bonjean said McConnell’s support for Trump was “to ensure that Republican challengers in battleground states have the full support of Trump at the forefront.”
Even former Vice President Mike Pence, who has refused to endorse Trump, called the ruling “outrageous.”
“The conviction of former President Trump on a politically motivated crime is an outrage and a disservice to the nation,” he told Fox News Digital.
“While no one is above the law, our courts must not be used as tools against political opponents,” he said, repeating an argument used by Trump allies who argue for the “weaponization” of the Justice Department.
Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said the ruling “will bring unity within the party.”
“You can say two things at the same time: ‘I’m not a big fan of Trump, but at the same time, this is completely wrong,'” he said.
O’Connell said the more than $30 million the Trump campaign has raised since the verdict was announced is “a good indicator of the rallying effect it has on so-called Republican voters, rank-and-file Republican voters.”
a Recent New York Times/Siena College Poll A survey of voters in six battleground states found that 49% of respondents did not believe Trump would receive a fair trial in New York, while 45% thought he would.
Ann NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist A poll conducted before the verdict was announced and released Thursday found that 25 percent of Republicans said they would likely vote for Trump if a jury convicted him.
The same poll found that 67% of voters nationwide said a conviction of Trump would not change the outcome of their vote in November’s election.
Before the verdict, Republican senators predicted that a guilty verdict could sway Republican voters to support Trump, putting Democrats on the defensive.
“He could win in a landslide,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said last month about the political impact a conviction would have on Trump’s chances of winning the general election. “It would be a very bad situation.”
Paul noted that the statute of limitations for Trump’s falsification of business records had expired in New York state, forcing Bragg to combine the falsification of business records and campaign finance violations in order to move forward with his case.
The Trump campaign announced that it had raised $34.8 million in the first six hours after the jury returned the guilty verdict.
Pro-Trump pollster Jim McLaughlin said Trump skeptics like McConnell, Collins and Pence support the former president because they are genuinely outraged by his conviction for acts the public has known about for years.
“What happened is people realized this was wrong, completely wrong,” he said, citing legal scholars including Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz, who have strongly criticized Blagg’s lawsuit.
Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, predicted on social media that the conviction would be overturned on appeal.
Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, warned on Fox News on Friday that convicting Trump would mark the start of a “war on the weaponization of the criminal justice system.”
McLaughlin downplayed the significant percentage of anti-Trump votes cast in Republican primaries in states such as Indiana and Nebraska after Haley dropped out of the presidential race in early March.
“I think this is overrated. I’m not too worried about the ‘Nikki Haley’ supporters. You look at the polls that came out before this. Trump is getting over 90% of Republican voters. The reason he’s doing so well is because he’s getting more Republican voters than Biden is getting from Democrats,” he said. “He’s solidifying the Republican base. He’s getting over 90% of Republican voters.
But some Republican senators acknowledge that a conviction could further alienate independent voters, particularly college-educated suburban women who moved away from Trump and the Republican Party in the 2020 presidential and 2022 midterm elections.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who said in March that she could not support Trump, said Friday that fielding another candidate would improve the party’s chances of retaking the White House.
“Any Republican candidate who doesn’t have these issues would have a clear path to victory,” she wrote on the social media platform X.
Murkowski said it was “unfortunate” that the presidential election was “focused on personalities and legal issues, rather than debates about policies that will improve the American people.”
“These obstructions have given the Biden campaign a free pass and shifted the focus from Biden’s inexcusable record and the damage his policies have done to Alaska and our economy to Trump’s legal drama,” she lamented.
Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan (R), who is running for U.S. Senate from his state, is one of the few nationally known Republicans who have broken with Republicans who have slammed Bragg’s case and the jury verdict.
“At such a dangerously divided moment in our nation’s history, leaders of all parties should not add fuel to the fire with even more poisonous partisanship,” Hogan said Thursday. “We must reaffirm what has made our country great: the rule of law.”
But that could spark a fierce backlash from the Trump camp and pose problems for Republicans in November.
“You just finished campaigning,” Trump adviser Chris LaCivita wrote on X, reposting Hogan’s comments.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told The Hill before the verdict was announced that a conviction would not diminish Trump’s popularity among Republicans.
“I don’t think it’s going to affect support at all because people already know about it. They know about his relationship with Stormy Daniels, they know about the money, and nothing new came out of the trial,” Romney said. “What the jury does one way or the other is not going to affect support for President Trump in any way.”
“I [the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)] 1994 [in the Massachusetts Senate race] “People were saying, ‘You should talk about Mary Jo Kopechne,'” he said, referring to the young woman who was killed in a car crash in 1969 while President Kennedy was driving.
“People have already thought it through, made their decision and moved on. Bringing it up again once people have made their decision is just going to frustrate them,” he said.
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