The GOP Is So Scared of Trump His 2024 Rivals Are Defending Him From Indictment

Donald Trump’s criminal indictment has led to a predictable result: All of the people who supposedly want to defeat him for the GOP nomination are suddenly outraged on his behalf.

Their reaction shows how terrified Trump’s opponents are of infuriating the former president and his supporters—and suggests Trump was right when he predicted an indictment would help him politically.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made the angriest and most ludicrous statement of the bunch, calling the indictment “un-American” and promising he would violate the U.S. Constitution by refusing to help extradite Trump to New York if the former president refused to go willingly.

“The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head,” he said in a statement. “Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda.”

DeSantis’ furious response was a notable reversal: While he has decried Bragg’s prosecution, just two weeks ago he mocked Trump for allegedly “paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair.” 

His threat is facially unconstitutional: Article IV, Section 2, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution declares that states do not have the right to decline to extradite people to other states where they face charges.

“A person charged in any state with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall on demand of executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime,” the Constitution states.

And DeSantis’ not-so-bold declaration came after Trump’s team had already indicated that he will willingly surrender himself for arraignment.

The rest of Trump’s potential 2024 opponents fell in line, too.

Former Vice President Mike Pence told CNN the indictment was a “political prosecution.” 

“The unprecedented indictment of a former president of the United States on a campaign finance issue is an outrage,” Pence said in an interview on Thursday night.

Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley said on Fox News that Bragg was trying to take political “revenge” on the former president.

“What we know is when you get into political prosecutions like this, it’s more about revenge than it is about justice,” she said. “I think the country would be better off talking about things that the American public cares about than just sit there and have to deal with some revenge by some political people in New York.”

And former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted that Bragg is a “Soros-funded prosecutor” who was “undermining America’s confidence in our legal system” with the indictment.

Pompeo’s attacks on George Soros—a wealthy liberal donor who has funded campaigns for progressive district attorneys in multiple states—has become a de rigeur attack on the right. Soros, who is Jewish, is a GOP bogeyman, and is a regular target of antisemitic conspiracy theories in far-right and white supremacist circles.

The only potential GOP candidate who didn’t dismiss the charges out of hand was former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who called it a “dark day for America” and said the grand jury must have found “credible facts to support the charges.”

Hutchinson, unsurprisingly, is barely registering in the polls.

Trump predicted early this month that an indictment would “enhance my numbers” in the polls—and he’s so far been proven right, at least within the Republican primary.

A Fox News poll released earlier this week, after Trump had declared he would be indicted imminently, found him winning support of 54 percent of likely GOP primary voters nationwide to 24 percent for DeSantis—a 30-point lead that had doubled since Fox last polled the race in February. No other potential GOP candidate reached double digits in either poll.

And a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 93 percent of Republicans thought Bragg’s prosecution was motivated mainly by politics, not law, with just a quarter saying that it should disqualify him from the White House (57 percent of Americans overall said it should).

The GOP base has flocked to Trump every time he’s faced seriously legal jeopardy—his poll numbers actually went up among Republicans during both of his impeachments— and it appears that hasn’t changed since he left office. As a result, the people who want to block him from the Republican nomination once again feel forced to defend their opponent or face his supporters’ wrath—leaving them in a lose-lose situation that only strengthens Trump’s grip on the party base.

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