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Former President Donald Trump has tried to use the indictment against him to turbocharge his fundraising efforts — and it seems to be working. His campaign said he’s raised about $16 million in the two weeks following his March 30 indictment on charges of falsifying business records. Nearly a quarter of the people making those contributions during that time period had never given money to Trump before.
Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman argues that even if Trump’s indictment might benefit him during the 2024 primary season, it’ll come back to bite him during the general election.
Let’s now go to the second bucket, which is the general election. I have no reason to believe, and I have seen no evidence that this indictment helps Trump get even a single new vote in the general election in 2024 that he didn’t already have in 2020. At the national level, to win in `24, if he’s the nominee, Trump needs to find new voters he didn’t have in 2020. I can’t think of any reason why someone who didn’t vote Trump in the general in 2020 is going to see the arrest and the indictment and say, “Oh, you know what, now I am going to vote for Donald Trump.” And Trump needs to find voters like that. And in fact, independents may see this all as very chaotic and say I’m either staying home or voting for whoever is the Democratic nominee. So while it may well be useful in the primary, I don’t think this indictment is at all helpful to Trump in the general election.
Now, one other thing on timing and logistics. When Trump was arrested, I mentioned these cases take a long time, and typically criminal defendants want to delay, delay, delay. There’s many reasons why you want to delay: evidence can be lost, prosecutorial priorities can change and the case might be dropped, witnesses can die, you know, all sorts of different things can happen.
In this particular case, right now, the timing is the next court appearance would be December of this year. It’s very likely that it gets pushed to January or February of 2024 because Trump’s lawyers have already said they would like to do that. There may be a further delay or the next stage in the case might not be until spring of 2024. That is the middle of the Republican primary. And so from a logistical standpoint, that can start to interfere. If you’re trying to go all around the country to do rallies, but you have court appearances in different parts of the country for different criminal cases, that’s not useful, helpful or convenient for campaigning and that’s another factor that has to be kept in mind.
