When Candidate Trump Becomes Defendant Trump

This week begins the criminal trial of a former president, who is now the presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee and the de facto leader of the Republican Party. America has never lived through a criminal trial of a former president or a presidential candidate. Yet this week, the country will experience both—simultaneously.

This criminal trial poses two big questions: First, will Donald Trump be found guilty? And second, will the salacious facts around the case taint him in the minds of voters? The conventional wisdom is that if Trump is somehow found not guilty, that will only make him more sympathetic in the minds of his voters. Yet it’s not entirely clear how sordid details from the proceedings will permeate the news bubble. Trump has pleaded not guilty and denied having an affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels. But the optics alone—of Trump’s former fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen testifying about writing checks to Daniels as well as possible testimony from Hope Hicks—could move voters in ways none of us can really anticipate. And while Trump may try his best to turn courtroom proceedings into campaign events, that doesn’t mean they’ll read as such to normal voters.

It wouldn’t be the first time a high-profile trial involving a major public figure has significantly altered public opinion in the US. O.J. Simpson, for example, may be not guilty of murder in the eyes of the law, but most people who watched his trial thought otherwise. In politics, the closest America has ever come to experiencing the events of this week was Watergate, for which President Nixon resigned in 1974. But Nixon, of course, took the high road and resigned before he was impeached and removed—a stark contrast to Trump, who has been impeached twice: once over his “perfect call” with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and another time for his involvement in January 6.

During both of these impeachments, Republicans were too cowardly to convict, allowing Trump to stay in political life, criminal trials be damned. Trump has since then spent more than $100 million on efforts to bat his legal troubles away. To this end, he’s been overwhelmingly successful: Trump has delayed and evaded nearly every major consequence to his brand and business, only adding truth to the “Teflon Don” narrative that coalesced around him in 2016, when he famously said he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and [he] wouldn’t lose any voters.”

But if the past few elections have taught us anything, it’s that it’s impossible to know what lurks in voters’ hearts, especially when we’re 200 days away from November. I’m not a huge fan of polls, though the latest from The New York Times/Siena College suggests that 54% of registered voters believe Trump committed “serious federal crimes.” And while the Teflon Don narrative suggests there is no saturation point for Trump voters—who have witnessed him commit high crimes and misdemeanors with virtual impunity—that doesn’t necessarily translate to political fortune. (Consider the likes of the 2020 presidential election as well as the 2022 House and Senate races.)

Sure, the ex-president may have a relatively good lock on his own people. For instance, 79% of Republicans consider him to be their trusted source for information on the Russia-Ukraine war, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll. But his own people are not the miniscule percent of persuadable voters Joe Biden needs to win over. “The difference between a guilty and not-guilty verdict in any of these trials could be the difference between president and not president for Trump,” John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, told me. “A guilty verdict for Trump could be a game changer among important subgroups of voters like young voters. It’s hard to measure, but some models show a high single-digit shift—or more—toward Biden.”

Worse yet for Trump: There are even some signs that his popularity among his people is flagging. As the Financial Times wrote in February, the campaign is experiencing small-dollar donor fatigue, and boasts 200,000 fewer donors than it captured in 2019. “Since late last year,” CNBC reported last month, “members of Trump’s team have been warned by Republican Party advisors that their small-dollar donor base could be shrinking.” Maybe it stands to reason that Trump’s working-class base is sick of paying for a billionaire’s legal fees. The optics of defendant Trump, in other words, could be hurting the optics of candidate Trump.

Perhaps most worrisome for Trump, however, is the responsibility that comes with his newfound position of power. As the lodestar of the Republican Party, he now has to answer to its (deeply unpopular) policy wins. Last week, shortly after the former president argued that abortion should be left to the states, the swing state of Arizona approved the enforcement of a near-total abortion ban from 1864, to a torrent of outrage on both sides of the aisle. Both Trump and Sean Hannity predicted it would be overturned, but the state’s conservative Supreme Court and legislature don’t want it to be, trapping Trump in a double bind between his own political interests and those of his fringe constituents.

Trump will now spend the next few weeks sitting in a courthouse while people from Trumpworld tell sorted tales of his malfeasance, including happenings that span his own presidency. Maybe voters won’t care, but that’s not a bet I’d want to make. The thing about being Teflon Don is he’s Teflon until he’s not.