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Imagine you’re the campaign manager for a major-party presidential candidate. You believe your boss has a realistic chance of winning, but he or she is struggling to gain traction against the party’s frontrunner and prohibitive favorite. To change the trajectory of the race, and to give your candidate a shot at success, something dramatic would have to happen to shake up the contest.
Then imagine that something dramatic does happen: The prohibitive favorite is indicted. Federal prosecutors, in this hypothetical scenario, present evidence that your party’s frontrunner took classified documents, refused to return them, defied a subpoena, showed sensitive materials to those who lacked clearance, encouraged his team to lie, and orchestrated a clumsy cover-up.
This would be, of course, the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. What luck! Finally, something your party’s candidates could seize to alter the entire primary.
But what if they don’t want to?
I have a hunch you see where I’m going with this. After Donald Trump’s indictment last week, it seemed, at least in theory, to be the sort of development that could shake up the race for the Republicans’ 2024 presidential nomination. But in practice, most of the GOP candidates responded to the charges by condemning law enforcement officials and touting baseless conspiracy theories about the politicization of the Justice Department.
There were competing theories about the Republicans’ motivations. Maybe they were afraid of their own party’s base. Maybe they’re positioning themselves as possible Trump running mates. Maybe they saw political utility in going along with partisan assumptions about “weaponization,” no matter how wrong they are.
Whatever the explanation, most of the GOP field had no interest in going after Trump, despite the seriousness of the evidence. As my MSNBC colleague Zeeshan Aleem explained on Friday, “most of his competitors for the Republican presidential nomination aren’t just declining to use the charges against him. They’re rallying behind him.” Zeeshan added that this is, given the electoral circumstances, “bizarre.”
It took several days, but some of the Republican contenders are starting to draw similar conclusions. Former Gov. Chris Christie, not surprisingly, is starting to seize on Trump’s criminal troubles, and as NBC News noted, so is Nikki Haley.
Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley changed her tune on Trump’s indictment, more sharply criticizing Trump during a Monday Fox News appearance, per NBC News’ Ed Demaria and Emily Gold. Haley said, saying that if the indictment is true, Trump “was incredibly reckless with our national security” adding that his actions “puts all our military men and women in danger.”
This represented a departure from Haley’s message from Friday morning, when the South Carolinian complained about “prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics,” all of which exist only in Republicans’ imaginations.
Also yesterday, Sen. Tim Scott was also willing to say the indictment represents a “serious case with serious allegations.”
It’d be an exaggeration to characterize these as sweeping condemnations, but at least they’re departures from the initial responses late last week.
It’s possible that other Republicans will soon dip their toes in the same waters, but that might prove difficult: After prominent GOP voices responded to the indictment by insisting that a corrupt Justice Department targeted a former president at the behest of a partisan White House — an absurd claim that’s been common in Republican circles — those who’ve pushed that line are likely to find it tricky to suddenly say, “Upon further reflection, Trump might’ve gone too far.”