The immediate reaction to the indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has been a run to support the former president from his fellow Republicans, including those who are or soon might be competing with him for the GOP’s 2024 nomination. But underlying this unanimity of disgust at the flagrant disregard for historical precedent, and the inflation of glaringly weak charges by Bragg, there is an obvious split in the right’s response to this new stage of lawfare against Trump — one which could become more obvious in the coming months.
On the one hand, you have the right-of-center Americans who are just plain shocked at this development. These include many Republican voters who really did not think Democrats would roll forward with something so thin and pathetic as this to indict a former president. You should expect these voices to be calling for moderate Democrats, centrists, cultural figures and the like to stand up against an insane step that will run down faith in law enforcement and the courts. Most GOP politicians in Washington will likely sound this note — essentially demanding that the Democratic Party live up to the “return to normalcy” they claimed to espouse just a few short years ago. Expect a lot of phrases about “the good of the country” from them.
On the other hand, there are the more apocalyptic-minded among the right’s cohort for whom these moderate Democrats or civic-minded centrists just don’t exist any more. For those who view a national divorce as an inevitable and maybe even a good thing, the call will be for Republicans to adopt the same standard toward Democrats as former speaker Nancy Pelosi has for Trump: we have trials so you can attempt to prove you’re innocent — go ahead and try.
This push for more aggressive lawfare will lead to the rise of candidates who promise to lock up their political opponents using any and all means at their disposal, and call Republicans who don’t make such a commitment weaklings, RINOs and establishment crooks. There will be an extremely aggressive push to end any possible return to normalcy, because they believe that hope is a fraud that allows blue to run roughshod over red. Expect to hear phrases from them like “you don’t know what time it is” — and for candidates and media figures to demand far more aggressive prosecution of political foes.
There’s a real danger for Democrats here that they will run into the “when keeping it real goes wrong” element of this crisis, and it is a crisis. If enough Republicans in positions of power, including attorneys general and prosecutors, adopt the opinion that it is in their best interest as a politician to seek out any crime, no matter how incidental, blow it up into a major issue, and then pursue the jailing of their opponents over it, an ugly period of escalated partisan lawfare could be with us for a long time.
There are people who believe in law and order as a principled matter — but if both sides come to accept the idea that it is merely a game to be won where you can punish and kneecap your opponents for any reason, then bipartisanship is truly dead. It will take a miracle to resurrect it.
