Everything that happens from here is new territory for American politics, with Trump becoming not just the first former president but also the first declared presidential candidate from a major party to face criminal charges.
We don’t yet know the full nature of the charges because the indictment remains sealed, but it appears to amount to a relatively low-level felony violation that would be unlikely to see Trump jailed.
Yet the details of those charges are secondary to the seismic political impact they will have on the 2024 election.
Trump remains the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, having recently extended his lead over his closest poll rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Trump will use the indictment as red-meat to galvanise his MAGA base, casting himself as the hapless victim of a political conspiracy against him.
This message served Trump well in 2016 when he ran as an underdog and exploited the Democrats’ hatred of him and the prediction of most pundits to win the White House.
Trump and his MAGA base claim they can do the same in 2024, with some believing that an indictment actually helps Trump’s reelection prospects.
But this view is a minority one, even within the Republican party, and it is based on hope rather than reality.
It is hard to imagine that this indictment is anything but damaging for Trump’s reelection prospects in 2024. Although Trump remains the most popular Republican candidate for president at this early stage, he has to expand his support beyond his rusted-on MAGA base in order to have any hope of defeating Joe Biden in 2024.
Trump lost the American swinging voters in his election defeat in 2020 and then lost even more support among moderate Republicans with his false claims of a rigged election result.
A criminal indictment may rev up his own support base but it is highly unlikely to bring him more support from those swinging voters and moderate Republicans who have already abandoned him over his “Big Lie’ claims after the election.
Instead, Trump’s indictment is likely to embolden more Republicans to declare their candidacy for 2024, including DeSantis, the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former vice president Mike Pence among others.
There will be an enormous political fight in the weeks ahead over the decision by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to charge the former president. Bragg is an elected Democrat and his decision to pursue Trump over the hush money payments will be seen by Republicans as a political vendetta.
It is also unclear whether any prosecution of Trump would actually succeed.
While we don’t yet know the exact nature of the charges, the case would almost certainly require the testimony of his former lawyer Michael Cohen. Cohen claims that Trump directed him to pay porn star Stomry Daniels $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 election in exchange for her keeping quiet about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump. Trump denies he had any such encounter. But Cohen will hardly be seen as a reliable witness having pleaded guilty to a series of federal felonies in 2018, including a campaign-finance offence for the porn-star payment, as well as charges of lying to a bank and to Congress.
Ironically, the hush money payment issue is widely seen as the least serious of the probes into Trump which also include a Justice Department investigation into the handling of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and
An investigation into Trump’s attempts to influence the 2020 election results in Georgia.
Even if Trump was convicted in the hush money affair there is no law that prevents him from running for president again. But in political terms Trump’s guilt or innocence is secondary to the fact that has been indicted.
It makes Trump’s hope for a political comeback in 2024 significantly harder.
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The 2024 US presidential race has been turned on its head with the indictment of Donald Trump for his role in paying hush money to a porn-star on the eve of the 2016 election.