WASHINGTON — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, both Ivy League-educated lawyers, leaned slightly Tuesday toward condemning former President Donald Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, then quickly concluded, failing to see the evidence, that any charges against you are fabricated.
Ramaswamy called Trump’s actions that day an example of «poor judgment» after the former president revealed that he had been informed by special counsel Jack Smith’s team that he is a «target» of their January 6 criminal investigation.
DeSantis said Trump should have moved «more forcefully» to stop the insurrection, but argued that «trying to criminalize that» was a mistake.
Like most of the candidates running against Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, DeSantis and Ramaswamy toyed with the party base, and helped Trump, by portraying the pending impeachment as a perversion of justice. The candidates who did not, Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, both former US prosecutors and governors, have long made it clear that Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election should disqualify him from returning to the White House.
So, with the chances of Trump being impeached for the third time this year rising to nearly 100 percent, there was no discernible movement within the former president’s party against him.
“This could be different,” said Terry Sullivan, who served as campaign manager for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 Republican presidential bid. “Now that that is said, Mission Impossible 9 could be different than the first eight Mission Impossible, but unlikely. It’s likely to end the same way the first eight did.»
There’s a pretty simple reason for that: the candidates had already locked in on Trump, Jan. 6, and the criminal charges against him.
His main rivals did not publicly criticize him in the two years between his departure from the Oval Office and the launch of his 2024 campaign.
They didn’t, at least not in a real or sustained way, when he was indicted in Manhattan in March on charges related to hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels.
And they didn’t last month when he was indicted in Miami federal court in a case involving classified documents he took with him from the White House.
Some rank-and-file Republicans in the party thought DeSantis waited too long to defend Trump after the first indictment. Others howled as he punched Trump as he railed against the impeachment.
The lesson for the Republican candidates was clear: Hit Trump on his legal troubles at your peril. So most of them haven’t. Their talking points are often echoed, reinforcing Trump’s political martyr narrative to voters and strengthening his bond with them.
That won’t change unless there is a massive change of heart among Republican primary voters, and Trump’s most prominent rivals are in no position to try to lead that movement because they have already weighed in on the impeachments and Jan. 6.
There is another world, according to some Republican strategists, in which a leading conservative candidate, probably DeSantis because he has long been seen as the top contender to take on Trump, risked dooming Trump from the start.
“There is a way to be critical of the FBI, the DOJ and the Biden administration, and to be critical of Donald Trump’s actions around January 6,” said a veteran GOP presidential campaign strategist who is not aligned. with a candidate in this election.
«A candidate who didn’t run a full campaign on that, but who was sure to be firm and focused that January 6 hurts Donald Trump in the general election… would have benefited from cycles and cycles of news coverage,» he said. the official. said the strategist.
For now, Trump stands alone at the top of the Republican ticket in a much stronger position than when the first impeachment was filed in Manhattan just over three months ago.
To the extent that his legal troubles could make Trump a weaker foe in the general election against President Joe Biden in November 2024, they have helped him more decidedly among primary voters so far.
Some Republicans think that may change.
«I am one of those who thinks that these [indictments] they finally add up,” said a Republican operative who is not working on either presidential campaign. «Which? I don’t know. When? I don’t know.»