This is new political terrain even for a country that thought it had seen everything after thugs invaded its Capitol building two years ago.

But there are some conclusions we can already draw about this week’s events.

The first is that America is poorer for this development. The decision by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, to charge Donald Trump on low-level felony is questionable on several levels.

When making the historic decision to charge an ex-president and a possible future one, you would think Bragg would have mustered a powerful, clear-cut criminal case against him. A former president is not above the law but the enormous fallout such an unprecedented prosecution was certain to attract made it imperative that Bragg have a strong case against Trump. Yet the case against Trump has been slammed by legal experts, including some Democrats, as complex, flimsy and murky.

It is alleged that Trump, along with his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, conspired to pay hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy bunny Karen McDougal to hide alleged affairs. But this is a felony offence only if Trump’s “intent to defraud” includes an effort to commit or conceal a second crime. Yet Bragg did not explain what that second crime might be.

In short, it will be a challenging case for the prosecution to win, and it could easily fall over.

As such, Bragg’s decision is widely seen as a politically motivated prosecution, further polarising an already deeply polarised nation. It will once again inflame America’s political landscape and stoke cynicism and disillusionment about the democratic process.

To prosecute such a low-level charge against a former president sets a precedent for US courts to be weaponised to settle old scores, disrupt a campaign or destroy a political opponent.

So has Bragg’s prosecution destroyed Trump or has it perversely boosted his prospects of winning a second term in the White House in 2024? The answer is probably neither.

If Bragg’s hope was to destroy Trump as a political force then it has backfired badly. Trump is now riding a wave of sympathy among Republican voters disgusted by what they view as a politically motivated witch hunt.

This support has been such that it has even forced Trump’s Republican opponents to grit their teeth and publicly criticise the decision to prosecute him.

As senator Mitt Romney of Utah, one of Trump’s most vocal critics, said: “I believe President Trump’s character and conduct make him unfit for office. Even so, I believe the New York prosecutor has stretched to reach felony criminal charges in order to fit a political agenda. No one is above the law, not even former presidents, but everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law.”

Trump’s MAGA base loves him most when it sees him as an underdog battling a rigged pro-Democrat establishment. This was the winning formula for Trump in his defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Bragg’s prosecution has allowed Trump to cast himself as that victim once again.

“I sat in a courtroom in the city I grew up in, the city I raised my family in, the city I loved – to hear that I could face 136 years in prison for having committed no crime,” Trump said in a statement after he was charged. “Winning in 2024 is about much more than just an election. It’s about the survival of our free republic.”

Trump’s indictment has only confirmed his status as the dominant frontrunner for the Republican nomination next year. Polls show that since his indictment, Trump has further extended his lead over his closest opponent, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. A recent Quinnipiac poll of Republican voters found 47 per cent support for Trump compared with 33 per cent for DeSantis, with no other candidates receiving double-digit support. Other polls show the former president with an even bigger lead.

Trump’s ability to hog the spotlight and dominate the GOP remains unparalleled even as the party debates whether it needs to move beyond the Trump circus.

Many moderate Republicans have hitched their hopes on De­Santis as a “Trump-lite” candidate who embraces Trump-style populism but without the personal baggage.

But DeSantis is a wooden performer who cannot come close to matching Trump’s charisma on the campaign trail. His recent national tour to plug his new book saw him stumble on some policy issues, including calling the war in Ukraine a “territorial dispute” – a comment he was later forced to walk away from.

DeSantis’s poll numbers have fallen – “like a rock”, according to Trump – as Trump has stepped up attacks on him, using political rallies to mock him as “DeSanctimonious” and “Meatball Ron”.

The absurd irony for moderate Republicans who want their party to move beyond Trump is that their task has been made more difficult – not easier – by the laying of criminal charges against Trump over hush money to a porn star.

But, while Trump is the clear favourite for the Republican nomination, he is no certainty. His next court appearance is not until December 4, just a month before the first Republican primary.

There is every chance his trial, if it proceeds, could take place during the Republican primaries or during the presidential election campaign.

The public truce Trump’s prosecution has brokered between his likely presidential opponents, DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence, is also likely to be shortlived.

“When Trump speculated his voters would stick with him even if he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, he probably didn’t expect to actually test their loyalty with a criminal indictment,” Republican strategist Nelson Warfield said this week. “But that’s the question he faces now: Will the base stay with him? The truth is: Nobody knows. I mean, this is something out of a John Grisham novel, not The Almanac of American Politics.”

Trump’s political prospects for 2024 may also be threatened by the outcome of three other investigations against him, which include federal probes into the discovery of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and his attempt to interfere in the 2020 election result. But the investigation that looms as potentially the most dangerous politically is the probe in Georgia into his efforts to overturn the election result in that state. This included pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” the votes needed to make Trump win the state.

Although the New York prosecution may ultimately help Trump secure the Republican nomination, it almost certainly makes him less likely to win the 2024 presidential election.

Trump is winning sympathy from more Republicans now because of this week’s events, but he needs to expand his support base beyond the party to win a second term in office.

Even if the MAGA base is red-faced and furious about his treatment, that base is too small to put Trump back into the White House.

To defeat Joe Biden, he needs to win back those swinging voters he won in 2016. But those voters have abandoned Trump three times since then – in the 2018 midterm election, the 2020 presidential election and November’s midterm elections, when pro-Trump candidates were trounced.

Those who believe this indictment makes Trump more likely to become president again are making the heroic assumption that these swinging voters will move back to Trump en masse just because they feel he has been unfairly charged.

“This is a prosecution that is being brought by a partisan and Republicans may, at least in the short term, rally to (Trump’s) side,” says Republican strategist Rob Stutzman. “(But) it’s still an indictment, and it’s a crime that’s being alleged … So, in a general election sense, this is a guy who lost the general election in 2020, and it’s difficult to imagine how this adds to his general election vote count.”

A CNN poll following news of the indictment found 60 per cent of Americans approve of him being charged, a figure that suggests many of the swinging voters Trump needs in 2024 are happy to see him prosecuted.

Joe Biden and the Democrats would much rather face Trump in 2024 than a fresh face such as DeSantis or Pompeo. Democrats would be thrilled by the political optics of this week’s arraignment, with Trump once again at the eye of a media circus, getting fingerprinted and charged.

Biden defeated Trump in 2020 not because Biden was a particularly strong candidate but because voters wanted a rest from the chaos and dysfunction of Trump’s presidency.

The spectacle of this week’s arraignment week and the grubby nature of the charges against him would have reminded many voters of the chaos that turned them off Trump in the first place.

Biden, meanwhile, is expected to announce in the coming months that he will run for a second term despite his cognitive decline becoming more apparent and despite the fact he would be 86 at the end of a second term. He has been preparing the ground for his presidential run by quietly moving closer to the ideological centre on issues such as crime, energy and immigration, where the Republicans can hurt him.

To the chagrin of the Democrat progressives, Biden is considering reinstating the Trump-era policy of detaining families at the southern border with Mexico, to slow the near-record high tide of illegal immigration.

Biden is also set to approve a major oil drilling project in Alaska known as the Willow Project, which could one day yield 180,000 barrels of crude oil daily, a move former vice-president and environmental activist Al Gore said would be “a recipe for climate chaos”.

On crime, Biden has recently rejected a new District of Columbia measure to reduce mandatory minimum sentences and he has started boasting again about his “Biden crime bill” from 1994, which led to sharply higher rates of imprisonment.

His recent drift towards the centre is in marked contrast to his courting of Democrat progressives early in his presidency, when he pushed through large-scale spending on climate change, social welfare programs and student debt relief.

Yet this move to the centre hasn’t helped boost Biden’s popularity. He remains lethargic in polls, with only a 43 per cent approval rating. Biden’s approval rating has never recovered from its tumble from 52 per cent to 41 per cent in the four months following his chaotic withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in mid-2021 but it has stayed in a narrow band between 41 and 45 per cent since September.

As presidents, Americans have embraced neither Biden nor Trump. And yet Trump’s poll bounce following his prosecution this week makes another Biden v Trump election contest next year more likely. That is hardly an inspiring prospect for a country that will now be more polarised than ever as it argues over the prosecution of its former president.

Cameron Stewart was The Australian’s Washington correspondent during the Trump presidency.