Donald Trump is claiming, on his Truth Social social media site, that he is going to be arrested Tuesday and charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office on charges related to a 2016 payment to pornographic actress Stormy Daniels, who says the two had a sexual affair in 2006. (Trump admits having made the payment, but denies having had the affair. His legal representatives say potential charges would be without merit.)
Sources besides Trump himself are less certain that his arrest is quite that imminent. The New York Times and Washington Post are reporting that no one in his inner circle is sure where he came up with the Tuesday claim. But multiple outlets have reported in recent weeks that charges may indeed be filed against him in the case for falsifying business records in order to conceal the payment to Daniels. (When Trump’s onetime lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to charges related to Daniels in 2018, he was accused of keeping the payment secret in order to circumvent campaign finance disclosure laws. It’s not clear whether the campaign-finance aspect will be part of the case against Trump.)
With the former president having recently increased his lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a number of polls of potential Republican primary voters, some observers have naturally begun to wonder how the potential indictment could affect Trump’s chances in a 2024 general-election race against (presumably) Joe Biden. Because hey, what else is going on in the world?
Opinionated billionaire Elon Musk and bestselling Beltway author Mark Halperin are among those who have predicted that a prosecution will all but guarantee another Trump presidency—in that it would be perceived by the average voter as a radical partisan attack, triggering a backlash against liberal Democrats that carries Trump to a victory in 2024. Halperin wrote Sunday that the indictment could change Trump’s chances of winning “dramatically, maybe even decisively.”
Is this true? Maybe it would be for a typical politician—someone who would respond to a potential indictment by trying to appeal to the beliefs and attitudes of, you know, the average voter. As a thought experiment, it is hard to imagine that there would be national support for a sudden effort by the Manhattan district attorney to hunt down and imprison, let’s say, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu.
But the former president’s reaction to the potential charges has been, characteristically, not typical. Trump, on Truth Social, has referred to Daniels repeatedly as “Horseface” and alleged that Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who is Black, is a “racist” who is being pressured to file charges by “[George] Soros” and other “Marxists.” He’s called on his supporters to “PROTEST!!!” against his impending arrest in order to “TAKE OUR NATION BACK,” reiterating his belief that the 2020 presidential election was “STOLLEN [sic]” and comparing himself to convicted Jan. 6 rioters (“AMERICAN PATRIOTS”) who are being “HELD IN CAPTIVITY LIKE ANIMALS.” (Trump also recently released a recording, produced in collaboration with a former Fox News anchor named Ed Henry who was was fired from the network in 2020 after multiple sexual misconduct allegations against him were made public, in which he recites the Pledge of Allegiance while a chorus of Jan. 6 inmates—recorded over the phone from prison—sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I am not making this up.)
His posts, for what it’s worth, are interspersed with automated Truth Social advertisements urging followers to, for example, obtain a “Free Trump 2024 Gold Bar” by visiting freedonaldgold.com, where one learns that shipping and handling charges for 50 “free” bars—the number the site recommends buying—will cost $199.50.
Many political questions don’t have answers that are even a little bit empirical. (How will Ron DeSantis perform in primary debates, for example?) No one knows what the future holds. (Is Ron DeSantis prepared to argue on national television that a short guy who wears high-heeled shoes can be an alpha male, as just another example?)
We do, however, have opinion polls and election results that provide insight into what American voters think about Trump, his trustworthiness, his attitudes toward women and racial minorities, and his theories about being persecuted.
What this evidence says is that a decisive and consistent number of voters don’t trust or like him (only 36 percent called him “likable” in one pre-2020 election poll, while about the same percentage have generally described him as trustworthy). Among the reasons voters don’t like him: They believe he’s sexist (51 percent to 34 percent here) and bad for race relations (67 percent here thought his reaction to George Floyd’s death made the situation worse), and that he acts often in criminal or at least unethical ways. (The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake runs down the impressively long list of Trump scandals in which the public has sided against him here.) Voters also don’t tend to believe his claims and counter-claims about being the victim of Deep State conspiracies. (See here for an example involving the 2020 election.)
In fact—in 2018, no less—more voters believed Stormy Daniels’ story about the alleged affair than believed Trump’s denial of it. Probably the least popular thing Trump ever did, moreover, was inciting his followers to riot in order to disrupt a legal proceeding, namely the ratification of votes in 2020. (As of July 2022, a CNN poll found that 79 percent of Americans said his involvement in the events of Jan. 6 was unethical or illegal.) Which, if his Truth Social posts about taking the country back are any indication, is on the table again this time.
There is also, at the least, a lack of evidence that the public responds to investigations of Trump (even those led by Democrats) by punishing the Democratic Party. Each of the last three election cycles have been awash in headline-dominating inquiry over Trump’s conduct. In 2018, the Mueller investigation was underway; in 2020, he’d been impeached for blackmailing the government of Ukraine; in 2022, there were both the Jan. 6 committee and the Mar-a-Lago classified document raid. Each time, Trump (and other Republicans) tried to frame the inquiries as hysterical partisan overreach. Each of those elections, particularly the most recent one, ended poorly for Trump and/or the Republican candidates most closely associated with him.
Trump might not be found guilty by a jury—that’s what the experts say. But if pursuing an investigation that ends inconclusively about allegations that Donald Trump behaved unethically was good for him, he would probably still be president. And if someone tells you they know for certain otherwise, they are probably not an expert.
