Trump, if nominated, may spend more time in 2024 sitting mute in courtrooms than he will orating to fanatical true believers in basketball arenas about “witch hunts” and stolen elections. Despite ridiculously premature polling showing the 2024 race neck and neck, it seems like a weird political strategy for the Republicans to rally around a thrice-indicted proven loser. The problem, of course, is that Republicans are still in the grips of a collective delusion that Trump is the legitimate president. A late June Monmouth University Poll found that 68 percent of Republicans believe—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that Biden only won in 2020 because of vote fraud.
A handful of prominent Republicans get it. Retiring four-term New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu said after the indictment, “There’s no independent out there going, ‘Yeah, I might go with Trump now. I’m back on the team.’” At a recent conservative forum in Iowa, Will Hurd, the former congressman who is mounting a quixotic presidential campaign, provoked massive booing when he said bluntly, “Let me be crystal clear: Trump’s presidential bid is driven by an attempt to stay out of prison and scam his supporters into footing his legal bills.”
By the evening of February 24, as the results from the South Carolina GOP primary come in, we will probably know whether the Republicans are a party out to win back the White House or a cult willing to immolate itself on Trump’s behalf. That decision by the voters will come before we have any clarity about Trump’s ultimate legal fate. But just as Jack Smith’s two indictments of a former president are unprecedented, so is the choice of democracy versus autocracy facing Republican voters in the early primaries and caucuses.