Some Voters Want an Outlaw

D emocrats learned quickly that the legal pursuit against Donald Trump had a political effect. In the beginning of 2021, Florida governor Ron DeSantis was tied or ahead of Donald Trump. When the first criminal charges came down, Trump consolidated the support of the Republican base, while it seemed to hurt him with suburban moderates and in the betting markets.

Their theory has some sense to it. There likely is some cohort of dutiful voters who are not paying very close attention to the details of these trials, but they nonetheless have faith in the American justice system. Donald Trump has always seemed like a man who at least plays fast and loose with the rules. And when they hear that a vote for him risks putting a “convicted felon” into the White House, they may think better of it and choose the man with dementia instead.

But it’s possible that Democrats have done a bigger favor for Trump than they realize. The most commonplace observation about the case that Alvin Bragg brought against Donald Trump in New York was that it would never have been brought against anyone other than Trump. In that trial, Bragg squeezed out 33 additional felony convictions by raising and multiplying the penalties for misdemeanor business-expense misstatements, by positing they were done in furtherance of another crime, and by providing the jury a menu of potential options for what that further crime was with instructions that they didn’t even have to agree on which one!

Many Republicans believe that Democrats just resort to stock caricatures of their opponents — they’re going to take away your Social Security and your contraception, and do racist things like enforce distinctions between citizens and noncitizens. That’s how you get partisan Democrats claiming in 2012 that Mitt Romney was the most extreme Republican nominee ever.

But Trump is different. For Trump, they release the Steele dossier directly into the press, unedited. For Trump, the Democrats launch Russiagate. For Trump, every creative legal theory becomes not just plausible but a necessary course of action.

There’s one problem for Democrats. All the extraordinary measures used against Trump actually repair his credibility with a certain set of voters who want something more than an average Republican.

There is a certain subset of Trump voters who soured on him only because he didn’t shake things up enough. He became too much like a normal Republican during his term in office; most of the party got along with him while he was in power. They got demotivated during the pandemic when BLM and Antifa protests and riots were encouraged, even as churches and businesses were shut down nationwide. They were the ones shouting to “Fire Fauci” in the early summer of 2020.

And potentially, there are a lot of these voters. The New York Times/Siena poll asked potential voters, “Which comes closest to your view about the political and economic system in America, even if none are exactly right?” Fifty-five percent said, “The system needs major changes,” and another 14 percent said, “The system needs to be torn down entirely.” Asked what would happen if Trump was elected, 45 percent said, “Major changes to how things work,” and 25 percent said, “He would tear down the system entirely.”

Only 11 percent said Joe Biden would make major changes to how things work.

By treating Donald Trump as a unique threat to the way things run, Democrats are burnishing his populist bona fides. When a majority of people want to see the American system majorly reformed or torn down, that’s a dangerous game to play.