When Donald Trump’s attorney and spokeswoman Alina Habba took to the streets Thursday in front of the federal courthouse in Washington, DC, she described the former president as “the leading candidate right now for president for either party.” It’s a slight stretch, but only slight: the former president is within the margin of error against Joe Biden in virtually every poll, largely undamaged by the ever compounding series of “solemn days” when he faces new legal woes.
The cliché usually attributed to NFL great John Madden is simple: if you’ve got two quarterbacks, you don’t have one. And in this case, the left is marshaling not just one case against Trump, but several — and experiencing the diminishing returns of such indictments.
Given how much clearer and stronger the Mar-a-Lago documents case appears to be, it’s astounding on a certain level that Special Counsel Jack Smith would even engage in this latest indictment. But urged on by a media champing at the bit for more material and more dire portents for Trump, he’s done it again. In so doing, he’s created a scenario where Republicans can turn the conversation into the weaponization of speech in an even more aggressive way, and, simultaneous with the ludicrous handwaving immunity deal offered to the president’s son, give more oxygen to all the most aggressive Republican critiques.
The media has made no secret of its affection for Smith’s strategy — following on the fawning CNN assessment of his bold, brave decision to get a sandwich at Subway in recent weeks, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell gushed over his personal devotion to health and exercise as a sign of his “grit” and “determination” in the courtroom.
“Jack Smith is someone who has run [in] over and competed in over 100 triathlons,” she rhapsodized. “He was reportedly at one point hit when he was on his bike by a truck and ten weeks later, he ran another triathlon. This is a man of a lot of grit and a lot of determination. And even what we have seen in these indictments is just a sliver of what they know and his prosecutorial team knows.”
Many commentators might say the political ramifications of this indictment are unclear, because it’s early yet. But we have plenty of evidence to show that these indictments are doing nothing to send Republican voters away from Trump, nor are they boosting Biden’s approval rating, which remains the worst at this stage in a presidency since Jimmy Carter. The likelihood that anyone is going to be shifted away from Trump by some new revelation is essentially nil.
So what Biden’s team is calculating, despite private warnings from people like Barack Obama, is that Trump is the least formidable candidate for them to take on next fall. Even with the lackluster performance of Bidenomics, even with the president’s well-evident struggles with senility, even with the overall sentiment among voters of a wrong track for the country and a world on edge, they seem convinced they can beat Trump by more than the 45,000 votes in three states they needed last time around.
That’s a lot of confidence. It’s one thing to believe in your own ability, and have faith you can motivate the right electorate. But we’ve been told time and again by these Biden Democrats that Donald Trump’s threat to the country is existential, that he cannot in any way be allowed back to the White House — and yet, with their legal strategy lived out through a partisan Justice Department and a cheering media horde, they are ensuring Trump gets one large leap toward that goal.
Democrats had better hope their leaders know what they’re doing.
