When former President Donald Trump was first indicted in late March, it quickly became obvious that his baseline support within the Republican Party was, as usual, holding firm. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of Trump’s most ardent supporters, argued on Sunday that that’s still the case, now that special counsel Jack Smith has charged Trump with hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate and obstructing their retrieval.
In fact, Graham went so far as to say in an interview with ABC News that Trump “is stronger today politically than he was before. ... We’ll have an election, and we’ll have a trial, but I promise you this: Most Americans believe, most Republicans believe, that the law is used as a weapon against Donald Trump.”
While the Republican voters polled support Trump and think that he’s being unfairly persecuted, it’s pretty emphatically not what they want to hear about on the campaign trail.
Not for the first time, Graham is wrong — though only somewhat. An ABC News/Ipsos poll found that more people on both sides of the aisle find these federal charges more serious than the charges filed in New York state related to hush money payments made during and after the 2016 election. Notably, 63% of independents think these charges are a big deal compared to 54% who thought so in April on the earlier charges. Somewhat surprisingly, the biggest increase is among Republicans in that survey, with 38% seeing Smith’s charges as serious compared to 21% when asked about Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s case in April — still a small number, but a clear increase.
Donald Trump is set to appear in court on Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET. Follow our live blog for the latest updates and analysis in his classified documents case.
But Graham is also partially right. Just as an NBC News poll in April found that more than two-thirds of likely GOP voters viewed Bragg’s indictment as “politically motivated,” polls released since Trump was indicted last week have likewise shown that the vast majority of Republicans surveyed believe that he’s being targeted for partisan reasons. A CBS News/YouGov poll, for instance, that found 76% of GOP primary voters were more concerned that the indictment was politically motivated than that the documents were a national security risk. That same poll also found that Trump still holds a commanding lead over his announced primary opponents, including a near 2 to 1 advantage over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Here’s where things get interesting in that survey, however: While the Republican voters polled support Trump and think that he’s being unfairly persecuted, it’s pretty emphatically not what they want to hear about on the campaign trail. When asked what they’d want Trump to talk about, 96% want to hear him discuss his plans for the country. In comparison, 61% said they don’t want him to talk about the investigations against him. Even more (68%) don’t want him to go on about the 2020 election.
For those of you who might just be tuning in, that is like saying, “We’d really love if Trump could become an entirely different human.” I can see no world in which Trump will suddenly stop whining about how difficult life is for him and how mistreated he’s been. It’s a given at this point that in any interview, no matter the questions asked, he will find a way to bring up the 2020 election and continue to lie about how it was stolen from him. In his first rallies after the indictment last week, he predictably spent a ton of time spewing invective about how he’s been subjected to a witch hunt. He can’t keep quiet even when it’s legally in his best interest to stop talking, as with how often he’s claimed that the classified documents the federal government recovered at Mar-a-Lago were his property or declassified, neither of which is the case.
In classic Trump fashion, the most damage to his campaign to stem from the Mar-a-Lago case could be entirely self-inflicted.
Even if he were to manage to somehow control himself for long enough to get through a single rally without bringing up his grievances, what else is there for him to talk about? The CBS/YouGov poll found that 90% of likely GOP primary voters named “having a plan to lower inflation” as a top priority for the eventual nominee. Compare that to those who think it's super important to support a national abortion ban (29%) or limiting transgender rights (26%). Yet Trump has made those “culture war” issues central to his 2024 campaign, alongside the constant stream of consciousness about how an innocent man (himself) is being targeted.
And therein lies the conundrum with how Trump fits into the political ecosystem at this point. Republican voters think that he’s their guy and he’s managed to convince them that attacks on him are actually attacks on them. At the same time, they want to hear about more than just how everyone is out to get him. The increased pressure from the indictments he faces — both those already filed and the two potential criminal cases still being investigation — will only make him lash out more.
In other words, in classic Trump fashion, the most damage to his campaign to stem from the Mar-a-Lago case could be entirely self-inflicted. Graham may be correct that Trump’s support among the GOP remains high despite — and in some ways potentially even because of — these indictments. But these charges are both the result of Trump being unable to alter his own behavior even when there’s clearly an incentive for him to do so. And there’s no behavior of his less likely to change than this overwhelming impulse to center himself and his own issues over the problems actually facing the voters who are looking to him for answers.
