Barabak: Trump’s ability to defy political physics may be coming to an end
From the moment he blustered his way onto the political stage, Donald Trump defied expectations.
He won the White House despite lacking any government or military experience, a first in the nation’s history. As a candidate and then as president, Trump drew supporters ever closer with his brash, impulsive and decidedly unpresidential behavior — not in spite of it.
When he was denied a second term, Trump failed to recede from politics, as his predecessors have. And now he’s again broken ground — breaking things being a singular capability — as he faces the very real prospect of being the first ex-president ever criminally indicted.
For those reasons, it’s foolhardy to predict the impact of Trump’s legal tangle with Manhattan’s prosecutor, the first of many potential prosecutions facing Trump. He remains, for the moment, the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination and, if so anointed, stands at least a decent chance of reclaiming the White House in 2024.
There is a strong case to be made, however, that things have changed — that Trump’s ability to defy political physics may have ended and his scot-free days are behind him.
After all the venomous tweets, the incessant lying, bigotry, narcissism and nepotism, the headstrong mismanagement of a deadly pandemic, after two impeachments and, most egregious, the attempted coup he suborned in the service of a lie he continues to promote, there is no doubting the nature of Trump.
Or what his return to the White House would mean.
Chaos envelops Trump like a bomb cyclone. Controversy trails him like the whiff off a cesspool. He warned of “potential death & destruction” if he were criminally charged, displaying once more his recklessness and titanic ego. The prospect of indictment is a dramatic reminder, if one was needed, of the former president’s essential mendacity and moral bankruptcy.
Polls show most Americans have tired of Trump, his wreckage and ruin.
Not those Fifth Avenue Republicans who constitute roughly a third of GOP voters, enough to boost Trump in the primary and make him the candidate to beat for the party’s nomination.
But it’s hard to see Trump gaining support beyond his base if he were indicted in a sordid case involving hush money and extramarital sex, whatever the outcome of the legal process.
And the notion that Trump’s indictment would edge him closer to the White House by firing up supporters seems equally far-fetched.
Trump’s repellent effect on swing voters and non-MAGA Republicans — especially women living in the nation’s abundant suburbs — has been well proved. It cost Republicans in 2018, when they lost control of the House; in 2020, when Joe Biden won the presidency; and in 2022, when the GOP, despite enormous advantages, failed to win a Senate majority and just barely reclaimed the House.
Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster and no fan of the ex-president, has conducted extensive research over the last several months among GOP primary voters, including some who supported Trump in 2016 and 2020.
“They’re just tired of the circus,” Matthews said.
Perhaps most significant, something else has changed since Trump first browbeat his way to the White House and into the hearts of Republicans: He’s now a certifiable, repeat loser.
“They want to win and they want to beat Biden,” Matthews said of many of those she’s surveyed. “They don’t think Trump can do it.”
It may be a stretch to hold Trump legally accountable, given the shaky foundation on which the New York case rests.
But the court of public opinion is something else, and the case against Trump is open and shut. The closest he should ever come again to the Oval Office is the chair he used as president and brought with him to Mar-a-Lago.
Best to lock him up in his resort compound and pitch the key into the Atlantic Ocean.
Mark Z. Barabak is a Los Angeles Times columnist.