Don’t ignore Trump’s threats of retribution: “As the legal vise tightens, he becomes more dangerous”

It is a fact that Donald Trump is in extreme legal peril. For allegedly violating the Espionage Act and other federal laws connected to that crime, he faces decades in prison. Trump will also likely be indicted for violating other laws across the country, such as in Georgia and Arizona, in connection with his coup attempt and the terrorist attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. It is now being reported that Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Department of Justice have interviewed and taken other testimony from dozens of witnesses including members of Trump’s inner circle regarding him and his coup cabal’s activities in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6.

The so-called resistance and many others in the mainstream political class and news media who are eager to see Trump punished for his many crimes against democracy and American society more broadly are celebrating what they hope will be swift justice and the end of the Age of Trump. These celebrations, however, are very premature. Donald Trump’s legal peril does not directly translate into political peril. During his decades-long de facto crime spree, Trump has shown an amazing capacity for not only evading responsibility but then surviving and triumphing. A similar dynamic is continuing at present, where the various criminal indictments, arrests, and investigations are only making Trump more popular among his followers, thus cementing his control as leader of the Republican Party and larger neofascist movement and white right.

Although it is not an exact parallel, as one of the first people with a public platform who consistently and loudly warned about the dangers represented by Trump and the MAGA movement in 2016 and before, it increasingly feels as though the mainstream news media and pundit class are making many of the same mistakes that they made seven years ago. 

In an attempt to work through and make sense of these anxieties about Trump’s enduring popularity and power as the frontrunner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, the consensus narrative that he is in great peril and his defeat appears to be inevitable, and more general concerns about what comes next for the Trumpocene and America’s democracy crisis, I recently asked a range of experts for their thoughts and insights.

Their responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Steven Beschloss is a journalist and author of several books, including “The Gunman and His Mother.”

Given the number and variety of felony charges already filed, given the number and variety still likely to come flooding in, any normal human would have already collapsed under the weight of it all. The capacity of Donald Trump to carry on demonstrates the power of narcissism and sociopathy to shield a man from the vicissitudes of crime and punishment. His concrete history of avoiding accountability surely strengthens his resolve. So does the willingness of his cult and elected enablers to maintain the lie that it’s all just political persecution toward the Republicans’ leading presidential candidate and likely nominee. So does the systematic effort of GOP-led legislatures to pass laws undermining voting rights and giving hope to a loser that he doesn’t have to actually win to regain power.

With this in mind, I hesitate assuming he can’t possibly win the nomination or conduct his campaign, even if he were in a jail cell. In fact, I believe as the legal vise tightens, he becomes more dangerous—not less so—as he pursues immunity to secure impunity by any means necessary. That places an intense obligation on the media to highlight with great clarity and intensity what his continuing assault on democracy and the rule of law may yield. Trump has already been explicit that he’s bent on retribution. And we’d be foolish to doubt that dark terrorizing force won’t fuel his aggrieved minions, won’t powerfully fuel his drive to the nomination and couldn’t possibly get him to the White House. With enough havoc, nothing is certain, including the survival of democracy and a free press.

Mark Jacob is the former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune.

Members of the news media who want to cover politics as a horse race seem to be declaring Ron DeSantis a failure. I think that’s premature. Eventually, the bottom is going to drop out for Donald Trump, as it does for many authoritarians and criminals. Trump is saying ever-more-dangerous things on social media and will probably get indicted another time or two. He’s not gaining any new supporters, or even trying to. The question is whether Trump’s base forces Republicans to make him their nominee, leading to his likely defeat in November 2024, or whether the GOP wakes up in time to choose someone else.

The really scary thing is that Trumpism won’t end with Trump. He has trained many Republicans to embrace hateful, anti-American views, and that mindset will likely transfer to another nominee if Trump falters.

I think Trump is a likely loser in a general election, but another Republican might not be. And elections are unpredictable. Given certain circumstances, Trump could win a general election. The election of any Republican to the presidency would be toxic to our country, and the election of Trump would be the worst outcome possible. It could well be fatal to American democracy.

Cheri Jacobus is a former media spokesperson at the Republican National Committee and founder and president of the political consulting and PR firm Capitol Strategies PR.

It’s difficult to envision Trump returning to the White House after twice losing the popular vote and decisively losing the electoral college vote the second time.  But experience tells me that it’s also folly to rely on what passes for “conventional wisdom” in this ongoing era of Trump, which, yes, we are still in, despite his 2020 loss. Trump gains momentum with press coverage, be it “positive” or “negative”. This formula propelled him to the GOP nomination in 2016 despite that overly tried and true “conventional wisdom” predicting otherwise.

Indictments may not be enough. Evidence going mainstream can erode his support in those margins where close elections are won or lost. Sadly, that is dependent on Fox News making a business decision that covering for Donald Trump is bad business. Yet Trump knows that as long as he’s a money maker for cable news TV, SuperPACs who depend on him as the nominee to make money for themselves, talk radio, and creepy dark money funders, he’s golden. Should the traditional Trump-friendly media determine he’s now too risky an investment and proceed to dump him, the GOP will then be free to coalesce around a safer choice.  Trump can’t win the nomination (let alone the White House) without them. However, the longer they wait to do this, the steeper the hill to climb.  Ron DeSantis is a weak candidate propped up by the money crowd – none of whom have ever made a dime as a political strategist. It’s no surprise he’s already deemed a “dud”. 

My ongoing fear that covering Trump, fighting Trump, supporting Trump (even knowing how dangerous and destructive he is to democracy) is still such a lucrative, addictive cottage industry, that those who “can” end him — don’t really want to.  And won’t.

Jennifer Mercieca, professor of communication at Texas A&M, and author of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.”

We’ve just finished celebrating a national holiday that didn’t feel very much like a celebration. I live in a small conservative town and when I talked to my neighbors (both liberal and conservative), they said that they didn’t feel much like celebrating. I went to a community event and there were few people there. That’s worrisome, because communal celebrations are what hold this nation together. Maybe it’s the weather and climate catastrophe. Maybe it’s the stress of politics and the economy. Maybe it’s the sense that the nation is hanging together by a thread and we’re on the verge of civil war—I don’t know. Most of the nation believes that we’re on the “wrong track” — likely for different reasons. Does that help Trump? Usually, if the nation believes it’s on the wrong track that signals a “change election” year, but a significant part of the nation might believe the nation is on the wrong track because of the lingering effects of Trumpism. And yet right now Trump has a massive hold on the Republican electorate. But, of course, no one has voted yet and we don’t yet know who the nominee will be.

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My money is on Trump to win the nomination. Will he win the presidency? Polls show that Americans continue to have an unfavorable opinion about Trump (as they have since he began running for president in 2015) and they approve of his indictments. However, Americans also have an unfavorable opinion about Joe Biden—almost as unfavorable as Trump, according to 538 polling. All of that makes it very difficult to predict what will happen in the presidential race. The nation is in a morass. It feels like we’re sinking in quicksand. I suspect folks want to be inspired, not threatened or scared. Maybe we need someone to make politics fun again and give the nation a boost of optimism and communal feeling like Obama did in 2008.

Rich Logis, a former member of the Republican Party and right-wing pundit, is the founder of Perfect Our Union, an organization dedicated to healing political traumatization building diverse pro-democracy alliances and perfecting our union.

Trump’s legal problems further endear him to most GOP primary voters. Trump figured out in 2016 that the primary voters are addicted to politically traumatic mythologies and revisionist history, centered upon gays/sex/marriage/male/Caucasian/Christian theocracy, guns, Obama/racial animus, hysteria, paranoia, and COVID. 2016 showed that national elections are less predictable than most realize. Though I am loath to prognosticate, I believe the GOP is going to be routed in historic fashion next year. But if Trump is the nominee, his chances of returning to the White House are not quite  50/50, but closer to 60/40, due to the Electoral College, and the fact that most voters are apolitical, don’t consume lots of political news and punditry, and only pay somewhat-close attention a month or two before Election Day. The Democratic Party needs to, especially, keep engaged single-issue voters; I anticipate more single-issue voters next year—motivated by our firearm-related public health emergency, the Dobbs decision, impugning of public educators, abridgment of voting rights and climate change inaction—than in any prior election, ever. Furthermore, I want to see the Democrats continue consistently meeting Americans in less densely-populated areas, and show them that the Democratic Party is more committed to improving their quality of life than is the GOP.

Mainstream adult press, and the punditry class, intellectualize their coverage of Trump/MAGA/GOP primary voters; columns and op-eds yearning for someone within the Republican Party to save the party, and save America from another term, almost always, are coming from centrist and center-left media. The press sees Trump and MAGA abstractly, not realistically; though, well-intended, the press naively believes that a party whose official platform includes accepting avoidable deaths and suffering; justification of political violence and a coup d’é·tat against our Constitution and electoral will of the people; and defense of a president absconding with some of our nation’s most closely-guarded secrets, can be saved. The GOP cannot be saved, irrespective of how many times the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The New York Times wish it were so.

I know the GOP cannot be saved because I was deeply immersed in the Trump/MAGA/DeSantis/GOP world during Trump’s 2016 candidacy, his time as president and the months following President Biden’s inauguration. If the mainstream press—who has not lived the traumatic MAGA political life I left behind—spent a singular evening with some of those I regularly broke bread with, methinks the press would not so eagerly insist that some candidate—somewhere—can save the Republican Party. Now is a time when unlikely political alliances—red, blue and purple—must concur on the same goal, in the interests of strengthening our democracy and institutions, and perfecting our Union: electorally mercy-killing the Republican Party. For this, we need the press to reject well-meaning delusions about a GOP salvation that will never come, and embrace a truth and reality that the GOP, long ago, passed the rubicon of integrity and honesty.

Brynn Tannehill is a journalist and author of “American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy.”

I believe that right now, Trump will probably return to the White House if the election were held today. The Electoral College favors Republicans, and Democrats need to win the national vote by about 4% to have a 50-50 chance of winning the presidency. Most of the polling out there now shows Biden with a 2-3 point lead over Trump. That’s probably not enough. FWIW: I built an election simulator. It shows Democrats with a 27% chance of winning the White House if they win the popular vote by 2 points, and 37% chance if they win it by 3. Biden’s popularity has diminished, and all it would take is a shift of a point to swing the election the opposite direction. Trump doesn’t look like a loser, because voting in the US is almost completely inelastic: there are very few “true” swing voters. It doesn’t matter what he does: he’ll always be competitive. He could loudly and visibly soil himself during a rally, and his base would dismiss it as a fabrication by the “biased media”.

The media loves Trump, because he’s a spectacle in the same way that a circus car crashing, catching on fire, and all the clowns punching each other in the face to put out the flames is a spectacle. I don’t think they really care anymore what reality is, as long as the articles get clicks.

I’m going to be very interested in the Trump-less debate that will be happening soon. Not because any of them will be the nominee, but because it will be interesting to see what themes they pick up on, because Trump will use audience reactions to adjust his own campaign. If they’re going right to “immigrant invasions”, “great replacement,” and “transgender people are a plague upon America that must be destroyed” and this stuff gets the biggest reactions, Trump will likely take us to a darker place than any of us want to imagine.

Rick Wilson is a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, a former leading Republican strategist, and author of two books, “Everything Trump Touches Dies” and “Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump – and Democrats from Themselves”.

Donald Trump is going to win the Republican nomination. He controls the levers of the party, is out-fundraising every other candidate, and is so far ahead in the polls it’s almost impossible he will be caught.

When it comes to the general election, this election will be close in battleground states much like 2020. Anyone dismissing Trump’s chances lacks imagination and doesn’t have any understanding of our political environment. We remain divided and the election will come down to a small group of voters who aren’t sold on either candidate. 

The media continues to dismiss Trump’s ability to excite his base voters and roll over his opponents. They have not learned anything from 2016 and J6 – they continue to treat him like any other candidate, not fact-checking him and letting him talk. CNN’s Townhall is the prime example of this.

The media needs to talk about his authoritarianism and stop equating him and his opponents. Trump is the greatest threat to the nation right now, and they continue to handle him with kid gloves because they are terrified about how they will be perceived by the conservative audience.

Third parties and independent candidates like those being pushed by No Labels, can swing the election to Trump since they will almost certainly pull away voters from President Biden. No Labels and independents are egomaniacs who have no hope of winning. They are risking the republic for their own personal benefit and revenge fantasies. No Labels in particular is nothing more than a MAGA SuperPAC.